Colorful Life (1907)  by Wassily Kandinsky

Colorful Life

Das bunte Leben

1907

Divisionism

Tempera on canvas

51.2 × 64" (130.0 × 162.5 cm)

Munich, The Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus

During his ethnographic expedition to the Vologda province, Kandinsky absorbed the world of the Russian countryside with its life full of all sorts of colors. He went there solely with scientific objectives, but he already perceived everything as a painter: people “were dressed in bright and colorful clothes, so they looked like two-legged moving pictures”.

In his early career Kandinsky was quite close to Russian epic themes and Russia in general. Paintings such as “Russian Knight”, “Russian beauty in landscape”, “Golden sail”, “A Russian Scene”, “Pareja a caballo”, “Volga song”, “Les Corbeaux” reveal the artist's strong Russian roots. But even then, we see the beginning of his search for something entirely new in his experiments.

In his lecture in Cologne in 1914, Kandinsky described his work on this painting as follows: "In Colorful Life, where the task that most captivated me was that of creating a confusion of masses, patches, and lines, I used a 'bird's eye view' to place the figures one above the other. In order to arrange the division of areas and the application of brushstrokes as I wished, in each instance I had to find a perspective pretext or excuse."

Painted in bright, bold colors using the Pointillist technique is filled with numerous figures in plenty, many of which we will independently see in further painter’s works: a rider galloping headlong with a sword, a couple in love paying attention to nothing, rowers cleaving the dark water with oars, an archer ready to set his arrow, a gloomy funeral and so on. Also as on the picture “Pareja a caballo” written a year earlier, there is a river serving as a barrier and a splendid town beyond it as a symbol of future, something alluring and wonderful that one must reach. The color and thematic saturation of the painting are the very colorfulness of life itself, on the threshold of which the painter stood.

4 comments

June 01, 2015
admin: scroll thru?

what you mean?
May 31, 2015
Sharon Saunders from San Francisco : Why can't I scroll thru these images?
December 16, 2014
Deborah from U.S.A.: His works look to me like the Nature of sub-atomic particles harnessed into visually palatable/subliminally understood WONDER.
December 16, 2014
Haq Nawaz Jamali from Pakistan: Superb art pictures. looks very beautiful. and origin .

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