Abstract modernism

Hilma af klint and kandinsky
Abstract impressionism
Abstract expressionism ww2

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Audio guide

Description of the artwork «Angular Structure»

In 1930, when ‘Angular Structure’ was painted, Wassily Kandinsky taught at the famous Bauhaus School. He was invited there in 1922 by Walter Gropius, the founder of the school-workshop. Kandinsky was very close to his ideas, and he gladly accepted the offer, especially since his old friends and colleagues worked in Bauhaus. He teamed up with Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Alexej von Jawlensky to form the so-called ‘Blue Four’, named in memory of the ‘Blue Rider’.
Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus until 1933, when the art school was closed by the Nazis. Over this period, the artist together with his colleagues and students had to move from Weimar to Dessau, and later to Berlin. Despite the attacks and criticism from the right-wing parties, the Bauhaus has continued its work. Kandinsky inspired his students to express themselves creatively, because he was inspired himself. Kandinsky taught the courses of analytical drawing, fundamentals of artistic design and, perhaps, the most important and valuable for

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Sans Titre (1941)

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as the pioneer of abstract art. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa (today Ukraine), where he graduated at Grekov Odessa 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) at the University of Dorpat (today Tartu, Estonia)—Kandinsky began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.

In 1896, Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbe's private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts. 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 re

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Peter Keler

Peter Keler was enrolled at the Fachhochschule für Angewandte Malerei (College of Applied Painting) in Kiel from 1914 to 1916 and at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in the same city from 1919 to 1921.
He studied at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar between 1921 and 1925. In 1921, he attended the preliminary course taught by Johannes Itten. From the winter semester of 1921/22 to 1925, he attended the wall painting department under Oskar Schlemmer and Wassily Kandinsky. During his time at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Keler devised colour designs for buildings and rooms such the office floor at the Fagus-Werk in Alfeld an der Leine and Walter Gropius’s director’s office in the Bauhaus Building.
The furniture he designed during this period includes a Cradle which he completed for the first Bauhaus Exhibition of 1923. In the summer of 1922, Keler became a member of KURI (an acronym for constructive, utilitarian, rational, international), a group with constructivist ambitions active at the Bauhaus. From 1924 to 1925, he was employed as a staff j