Kandinsky's Seven Years in Russia
In December 1914, Kandinsky returned to Moscow after almost twenty years of living in Germany. Being Russian by nationality, he had to leave the country which had become his creative homeland, his birthplace as an artist. On August 3, 1914, Kandinsky and Münter left for Switzerland, where they stayed until the end of November, and then parted: Münter went to Stockholm, while Kandinsky headed for Russia. Although Kandinsky and Münter met in Sweden in early 1916, their twelve-year period of being together was over.
In the autumn of the same year, Kandinsky made an acquaintance with Nina Andreyevskaya on the phone. She was a General's daughter, a well-educated 17-year-old girl studying History and Philosophy at Moscow University. Kandinsky fell in love with her voice and, in a couple of days, created a watercolor painting under the impression To the Unknown Voice. On February 11, 1917, they got married.
In Russia, Kandinsky witnessed the aftermath of the Revolution. Although he was indifferent to politics and absolutely devoted to art, he was nevertheless involved in the events. He took a position as Director of the Museum of Painting and Culture and worked towards implementing a museum reform in the new country. He taught at SVOMAS and VHUTEMAS and wrote six major articles. But when forwarding his ideas, he took the path of confronting those who supported and promoted "the party line" in art. The conflict grew, and the artist left the country, as many others did before and after him. Moreover, the Kandinskys' recently acquired family happiness was clouded by great grief in 1920 when their three-year-old son, Vsevolod, died. In 1921, the Kandinskys moved to Weimar at the invitation of Walter Gropius, Director of the Bauhaus.
There was a clear distinction between Kandinsky as a proselytizer of pure spirituality in art and a functionary arranging the new Soviet cultural idea. However, the influence of certain post-revolutionary ideas and their proponents on the artist's creative work should not be underestimated. As Clark V. Poling writes in his book Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years 1915–1933: "The seven years Kandinsky spent in Russia occasioned a transition in his art, from the expressionist abstraction of the immediately preceding Munich years to the geometric style of his Bauhaus period. A parallel shift in his theoretical work began to occur in Russia, as he increasingly emphasized the objective characteristics of formal elements and the principles of their use. This change was to be reflected in his teaching and writing at the Bauhaus from 1922 to 1933."
Kandinsky, in his turn, also had a serious impact on Russian avant-garde artists. Nevertheless, he is sometimes blamed for not being deeply interested in and supporting the advances of the young generation, such as Malevich's Suprematism. It should, however, be understood that Kandinsky's lyrical approach to abstraction was an inherent result of his success in Munich and the field where he continued carrying out his own experiments. As for accusations of "Occidentalism" and detachment from Russia, we adhere to the idea of the initial cosmopolitan nature of both the Russian spirit in general and Russian art in particular. Art critics Umansky, Zehder, and, of course, Kandinsky himself wrote about this back at that time.
