Impressionist Art

Today, my class has to select our favorite abstract expressionist and talk about them. I can't pretend to like or understand that kind of art, but one guy I thought was pretty good was Wassily Kandinsky. Here are some of his paintings:

    
Kandinsky was a big believer in what he called inner necessity- the true hidden beauty of everyday life. This influenced a lot of his earlier paintings. He was also an expert in music and philosophy and frequently compared the two to art. Though he was very smart and school came easy to him, he was known for having a very hard time relaxing, and he felt overwhelmed by the world, channeling these feelings into his paintings. That feeling of being overwhelmed was the primary emotion he put into his art as he shows in the seemingly random jumbles of shapes and objects in some of his paintings. He also frequently used The Bible for inspiration, particularly Revalation, as many of his paintings dealt  with the end of the world.

     Some of his paintings give a positive "Oh, that's nice" reaction like the one of the street and the horse one. Others are violent and random-seeming and give a more negative feel. Abstract expressionalism was fueled by a desire for change and to establish American art. Those may not have been what motivated Wassily, but it's what his work inspired for many other artists nontheless.