Artistic metamorphosis (1896–1911)
Kandinsky's time at art school, typically considered difficult to get through, was eased by the fact that he was older and more settled than the other students. It was during this time that he began to emerge as a true art theorist in addition to being a painter. Unfortunately, very little exists of his work from this period, though it is supposed to have been extensive. The survival of his works changes at the beginning of the
20th century and much remains of the many landscapes and towns that he painted, using broad swathes of color but recognizable forms. For the most part, however, Kandinsky's paintings did not emphasize any human figures. An exception is
Sunday, Old Russia (1904) where Kandinsky recreates a highly colorful (and no doubt fanciful) view of peasants and nobles before the walls of a town.
Riding Couple (1907) depicts a man on horseback, holding a woman with tenderness and care as they ride past a Russian town with luminous walls across a river. Yet the horse is muted, while the leaves in the trees, the town, and the reflections in the river glisten with spots of color and brightness. The work shows the influence of
pointilism and works to blend back-, middle-, and foreground into a luminescent surface.
Fauvism is also apparent in these early works. Colors are used to express the artist's experience of subject-matter—not to describe objective nature.
Perhaps the most important of Kandinsky's paintings from the decade of the 1900s was
The Blue Rider (1903) which shows a small cloaked figure on a speeding horse rushing through a rocky meadow. The rider's cloak is a medium blue, and the shadow cast is a darker blue. In the foreground are more amorphous blue shadows, presumably the counterparts of the fall trees in the background. The Blue Rider in the painting is prominent, but not clearly defined, and the horse has an unnatural gait (which Kandinsky must have known). Indeed, some believe that a second figure, a child perhaps, is being held by the rider (though this could just as easily be another shadow from a solitary rider). This type of intentional disjunction allowing viewers to participate in the creation of the artwork would become an increasingly conscious technique used by the artist in subsequent years—culminating in his great "abstract expressionist" works of the 1911–1914. In
The Blue Rider Kandinsky shows the rider more as a series of colors than of specific details. In and of itself,
The Blue Rider is not exceptional in that regard when compared to contemporary painters, but it does show the direction that Kandinsky would take only a few years later.
From 1906 to 1908 Kandinsky spent a great deal of time travelling across
Europe,(he was an associate of the
Blue Rose (art group) symbolist group of Moscow) until he came to live in the small
Bavarian town of
Murnau. The Blue Mountain (1908–1909) was painted at this time and shows more of his trend towards pure abstraction. A mountain of blue is flanked by two broad trees, one yellow, and one red. A procession of some sort with three riders and several others crosses at the bottom. The faces, clothing, and saddles of the riders are each a single color, and neither they nor the walking figures display any real detail. The broad use of color in
The Blue Mountain, illustrate Kandinsky's move towards art in which the color itself is presented independently of form.