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Artist or Maker: Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)
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Provenance: Nina Kandinsky, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris.
Private collection, France, acquired circa 1957-1960; sale Sotheby's New York, 9 May 1995, lot 88.
Acquired at the above sale by the previous owner.
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Exhibited: Dresden, Galerie Neue Kunst Fides, Wassily Kandinsky, September - November 1924.
Wiesbaden, Neues Museum, Nassauischer Kunstverein und Wiesbadener Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Wassily Kandinsky, January - February 1925, no. 29.
Halle, Roter Turm, Hallischer Kunstverein and Städtisches Museum Moritzburg, Retrospektive, October 1929.
Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, 12th International Exhibition of watercolors, 1932, no. 169.
Lucerne, Galerie Rosengart, Kandinsky Exhibition: Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings, June - September 1953, no. 1.
Paris, Galerie Maeght, Kandinsky: Aquarelles et gouaches, Collection privé de Madame W. Kandinsky, November 1957, no. 19.
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Literature: The Artist's Handlist, Watercolours (as 'IV 1924, 128, Festes I').
V. Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolours, Catalogue raisonné, vol. II, 1922-1944, London, 1994, no. 685 (illustrated p. 101).
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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A EUROPEAN COLLECTOR
'The teaching of drawing at the Bauhaus', Kandinsky maintained, 'is an education in looking, precise observation, and the precise representation not of the external appearance of an object, but of constructive elements, the laws that govern the forces (=tensions) that can be discovered in given objects and of their logical construction' (Wassily Kandinsky, 'Analytisches Zeichnen', Bauhaus, 1928, cited in K.C. Lindsay & P. Vergo, Wassily Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Boston, 1982, p. 729).
Executed in April 1924 at the height of Kandinsky's involvement with the Bauhaus, Festes I (Solid I) is an abstract landscape of form that expresses many of Kandinsky's analytical experiments with geometry and colour. A combination of rigid geometrical elements with more rounded and organic-looking forms, seemingly transparent overlaps, independent directional lines and emphasis marks, the work expresses Kandinsky's oft-stated intention that his compositions be complete 'worlds' in themselves.
Painted during a period when Kandinsky was heavily preoccupied with the theoretical analysis of form that he would later publish in his treatise Pünkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane), Festes I is an approximation of many of the ideals outlined in this work. It is nevertheless, like the majority of Kandinsky's work, an approximation of these ideals rather than a literal transcribing of them. In his theoretical writing, Kandinsky was methodical and dry but in his painting, fortunately, he was sensual and impulsive, responding to form and colour in the way he hoped the viewer would, emotionally. The title of this work, like so many of Kandinsky's Bauhaus works on paper, reflects the general atmosphere instilled by the carefully orchestrated composition of non-objective coloured forms set against an infinite white background.
The juxtaposition of an emotive title with the simple abstract geometry of his compositions was intended to coax the viewer into an understanding of both the experimental and ultimately transcendental aims of Kandinsky's art. As a kind of geometricised version of some of Kandinsky's early 1913 abstract landscapes Festes I, in its translation of a more organic and nature-based abstraction into the harsher geometric language he favoured at the Bauhaus, reflects the sharpening of Kandinsky's focus on the mechanics of his own creativity. Believing that 'Form itself, even if completely abstract... has its own inner sound' to the point where it becomes 'a spiritual being' with its own 'spiritual perfume', Kandinsky sought through pictorial theory to discover the rules of an underlying and universal order of harmony that he believed lay at the root of all creation.
Despite its geometric clouds and mountains, rainbow and radiant sun and its undeniable sense of landscape, Festes I is a completely abstract work which, more than most, appears to reflect the analytical transformation that Kandinsky's research took.
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