Como de costumbre, destacando a mujeres artistas que a mi no me presentaron en la facultad y debieron de haberlo hecho. Tantas mujeres artistas que han contribuido, y mucho, a la historia del arte y han sido pintoras importantes y famosas (en ciertos circulos), no pueden quedarse en el olvido.
Hoy os hablo de Gabriele Münter, la que fue, entre unas pocas féminas, importante en el desarrollo del expresionismo alemán. Pero quizá la quieran meter en la historia solo por haber sido la amante de Wassily Kandinsky. Participó en muchos de los movimientos artísticos de Munich y también en el grupo Der Blaue Reiter (El jinete azul).
Gabriele nació en Berlin en 1877 y a los 20 años comenzó a dar clases de arte en Dusseldorf. Se trasladó a Munich en 1901 y cuando intentó ingresar en la Academia de Bellas Artes de Múnich se encontró con la realidad de que no admitían mujeres. Pero entonces, aburrida de las escuelitas para mujeres, buscó su camino, y su futuro, en el grupo y escuela de Kandinsky, Phalanx.
Münter creo su propio lenguaje en el arte. No unía los colores, si no que los iba separando con…el poder de…la linea negra. Fue miembro fundadora de la Neue Künstlervereinigung München (La Nueva Unión de Artistas de Múnich), grupo que había iniciado Kandinsky y que incluía a los mas importantes artistas del Der Blaue Reiter.
Como siempre os digo, hay mas, mucho, mucho mas, así que tenéis tela marinera. Gabriele Münter murió en 1962.
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As usual, I am highlighting women artists who were not introduced to me at university and should have been. So many women artists who have contributed significantly to art history and have been important and famous painters (in certain circles) cannot be forgotten.
Today I’m talking about Gabriele Münter, who was, among a few other women, important in the development of German expressionism. But maybe some want to put her in history just for having been the lover of Wassily Kandinsky. She participated in many of the artistic movements in Munich and also in the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group.
«Münter created her own language in art and an interesting style. She didn’t blend the colours, but rather separated them with…the power of…the black line. She was a founding member of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (The New Association of Artists in Munich), a group that had been initiated by Kandinsky and included the most important artists of the Der Blaue Reiter.«
Like I always say, there is more, much, much more, so I leave you to your research!Gabriele Münter died in 1962.
(«The Blue Mountain» a bucolic painting from 1908/Wassily Kandinsky/image cuadrosfamosos.es)
As I showed you yesterday, Kandinsky did not start off as a painter and when he did he did not start as an abstract painter. He started by painting fauve style landscapes. But little by little the power of the colour began to replace the need to be so figurative. «The Blue Mountain» begins to demonstrate that transition, if you will, from figurative to abstraction…
Wassily’s grandmother was from the aristocracy and Mongolian and his mother was from Moscow. His childhood was spent between Moscow and Odessa and in that city, where the moved to in 1871, he studied piano and cello…
In 1901, having moved to Munich, he founded the group Phalanx. This was basically a group of artists that had joined together to bring to Munich the vanguards of art from Paris. In 1902 he exhibits for the first time in Berlin. Then in 1904 he exhibited in the Salon d’Automne (an exhibition celebrated yearly in Paris since 1903).
(«Der Blaue Reiter»/»The Blue Rider»/1903).
«The Blue Rider» was one of his most important paintings of the early part of the XXth Century. It is believed by some art historians that there is a second figure, perhaps a child, that the rider is holding tight. Or it could only be a shadow. But this intentional ambiguity, allowing the observer to actually complete the work, became something Kandinsky used in other works subsequently and which reached its peak in the abstract period of 1911-1914. As you might notice, the rider is nothing more than splotches of colour and lacks any specific details. This painting indicates the route Kandinsky would take with his art soon enough.
In 1911, together with Franz Marc and other artists, Kandinsky founded an expressionist/expressionism movement in Munich and called it Der Blau Reiter (The Blue Rider). This movement transformed German expressionism.
This is one of the fundamental parts of his career as a thinker and as a painter. For me it is one of the things that make him a reference as I consider myself an expressionist artist. The other is abstract art, which I love and which I am practicing to develop. In other words, Kandinsky is still teaching me to reach out and become a fuller, more complete artist. So his influence for me is dual, on the one side the study of colour and forms in the creation of abstract art and the other is the philosophical/spiritual aspects of art which to me are implacable and most needed.
PART THREE IS COMING IN THE NEXT EDITION OF ARTISTS SERIES
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I know there are many blogs dedicated to inform or to critique art, contemporary and/or historical and I do too, so let’s get into it…
The «Artists Series» began yesterday with Robert Lenkiewicz, and continues today with an artist that I have always admired and who is one of my main references. Wassily Kandinsky, the creator of abstract art…erroneously…who was born in Russia en 1866. He did not start life as an artist but as a lawyer. He must have been a good one because he was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat, the oldest law institution in Estonia. But he turned it down and turned to painting instead. He was thirty years old at the time.
He moved to Munich in 1896 where he studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. But very soon (1914) the Great War broke out and he returned to Moscow. Shortly after, the Russian revolution took place and Kandinsky joined… more or less… Anatoli Lunacharski’s cultural administration (Commissioner of Education of Soviet Russia) and even helped to found the Museum of Culture of Painting.
However, his spiritual beliefs and his sense of realism did not fit with the materialism of the communists. After all, the communists do not allow the minds of their indoctrinated to be diluted with other ideologies. Kandinsky cleverly returned to Germany in 1920. He was a professor at the Bauhaus School (art and architecture) from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. In Germany, he created his best works…
Here are some of his early works of figurative (landscape) art, probably from 1902 to 1909…
(Foto/Photo El Mundo)
(Foto/Photo Todo Cuadros)
(Foto/Photo es.wikipedia.org)
On our next programme, part 2 of Wassily Kandinsky…
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Does a man commit an illegal act by climbing over a fence to enter a country that can offer a better life for himself and his family? Should there even be such a fence? The struggle for existence is a hard one for many people in many places of the world that have been ruined by wars, communism and other destructive forces. So, is it a crime to want to leave? Should we not all try to seek higher ground? Don’t we have a duty to ourselves and to our families to provide as best as we can?
The United States, the United Kingdom and most of Europe is a haven for people seeking shelter from the ravishes of disastrous countries of the Third World. Our countries are considered First World, industrialised, civilised and developed and with the capacity to absorb whatever the world can throw at them. Especially the United States. Europe is the old continent. We are settled people with roots that go back to pre-history, but the US is a new land and a large one, where everybody, including the Indians, arrived from somewhere else. So in a most direct, historical way, everybody there was, at one time, an «Illegal» alien.
But the term «illegal alien», which many in the US choose to use to dehumanise those who would come to seek a better life in the US, is an ugly title indeed to place upon any human being. As I have seen and heard, many, probably led by the virulent ideas of Donald Trump, think that those who would cross the US/Mexico border are nothing more than scoundrels who wish to come to their country to pillage and destroy. But nothing could be further from the truth. Those are racist thoughts fuelled by hate and fear.
Immigrants come to work. Those on the other side of the fence are families, children, young men and women who also deserve a piece of the pie. They have committed no crime to be labelled as illegal or as aliens and they have a right to be there. And why? Because the US is a land of immigrants and the greatness of the country is thanks to its being open to immigrants from all over the world. Should the US close itself to immigrants it would not function as it has for the last hundred years of its existence.
It’s about time that all of us start thinking that we do not own the world. Everybody else has as much right as we do. Hating them does nothing but rot our soul, destroy our spirit and places us at odds with God Himself who so loved the world…