Well. That’s a wrap. And a circular one, at that. The January New Sounds post featured a collage with a big white circle by Yatuka Matsuzawa. The December New Sounds post features a painting with a big black circle and several other, more colorful circles by Wassily Kandinsky.
Kandinsky hardly needs an intro, but here ya go. Born December 16, 1866 in Moscow, Russia; died December 13, 1944 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. In his nearly 76 years on Earth, he made some of the most important abstract art in history. Here’s a cut-and-paste from the Wiki:
“He spent his childhood in Odessa, [Ukraine], where he graduated [art school]. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law [no idea, and I went to law school]) at the University of Dorpat [in Tartu, Estonia—Kandinsky began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.
In 1896, Kandinsky settled in Munich …. He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Following the Russian Revolution, Kandinsky ‘became an insider in the cultural administration of Anatoly Lunacharsky and helped establish the Museum of the Culture of Painting. However, by then ‘his spiritual outlook … was foreign to the argumentative materialism of Soviet society,’ and opportunities beckoned in Germany, to which he returned in 1920. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939 and producing some of his most prominent art.”
The header image is from the Bauhaus period.
I don’t have a clever segue this time.
The New Sounds from December 2021…
The year-end post (with the best albums list and the best tracks playlist) will follow in a few.
More soon.
JF
Liner Notes 