Moscow. Red Square (1916)  by Wassily Kandinsky

Moscow. Red Square

1916

Oil on canvas

20.3 × 19.5" (51.5 × 49.5 cm)

Moscow, The State Tretyakov Gallery

Moscow. Red Square is an original urban landscape that is far from the task of reproducing the look of the square. Kandinsky creates an image of the center of Moscow, one of his favorite cities. Partly using a futuristic method of conveying the movement of shapes, he is a kind of turning in the middle of the square and showing its major monuments. The artist wrote that he particularly loved the time, when the sun goes down and “melts all of Moscow down to a single spot that, like a mad tuba, starts all of the heart and all of the soul vibrating.” This hour of sunset is “the final chord of a symphony that takes every color to the zenith of life that, like the fortissimo of a great orchestra, is both compelled and allowed by Moscow to ring out.”

“Moscow represents duality, complexity and a high level of mobility, collision and confusion of separate elements of appearance… I consider this internal and external Moscow to be the starting point of my starving. Moscow is my pictorial tuning fork”. Kandinsky

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5 comments

16 January 2023
Han: It amazes me how modern it looks for being from over a hundred years ago.
24 August 2022
Neil: I've had this print for many years and I see something new it in every time. The same with Composition VII. Just learning he had Synesthesia, where both audio and visual senses link, brings out more for me to discover.
11 December 2020
Thibault: another Kandinsky that leaves me speechless
21 November 2019
rob: astonishing depth
14 October 2019
cristian: Amazing Artwork

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