Google Doodle celebrates abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky

16 Dec 2014

An impressive new Google Doodle has been created to mark the 148th anniversary of the birth of Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky.

Today’s doodle is done very much in the style of Kandinsky’s Bauhaus period, fusing art with spirituality, psychology and making particular use of colours, lines and points.

Born in Moscow on 16 December 1866 Kandinsky was late to painting, beginning his art career at the age of 30 after a successful career as a professor of economics and law.

Not impressed by Communist Russia’s theories on art Kandinsky left Russia and settled in Munich where he taught at the Bauhaus School of art and architecture from 1922 until 1933 when the Nazis closed it down.

He then moved to France where he produced his most prominent art until his death in 1944.

As much an art theorist as an actual artist Kandinsky’s view on art that it was actually a spiritual pursuit, as much for the painter as the person viewing a painting – the soul needed it. Colours charm the beauty of the soul, points have meaning and direction and while humanity searches for external success, it often ignores spiritual needs.

A typical example of interpreting Kandinsky is a triangle or pyramid – the artist has a mission to lead others to the pinnacle with his work.

“Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul,” Kandinsky famously wrote.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com