World Arts Culture Stills

Janwary 27 Tuesday

World Arts Images

Wassily Kandinsky (1886 – 1944), the father of abstract art, also a skilled musician,

strongly associated music with art. Kandinsky, who named works after musical

terms, saw color when he listened to music, and believed color could visually

express music’s timber, pitch and volume. At age 30, Kandinsky’s artistic career

began when he left a legal career to pursue artistic studies after seeing Monet’s

“Haystacks.” Passionately compelled to create, Kandinsky believed that the purity of

this desire would communicate itself to viewers of his work.
This high-quality art print is expertly produced to capture the vivid color and

exceptional detail of the original.


Gustav Klimt’s “Water Serpent” series dazzles with glimmering gold tones, lavish

ornamentation, and erotic themes. Klimt (1862 – 1918) overcame poverty to come a

forerunner in the Viennese Secession and Art Nouveau movement. An eclectic mix

of multicultural styles, his work is sensuality dominated and threaded with themes of

rebirth, love and death.

Salvador Dali’s “The Elephants” blurs the division between fantasy and reality. A

20th century artistic pioneer who redefined Surrealism, Dali is influenced by Roman

sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini by his use of skinny elephants to symbolicly convey

desire while the objects the carry represent power and domination. The frail

elephants’ ability to bear a heavy burden is one of Dali’s trademark phantom realities

in which the he expresses more complicated concepts through his use of the usually

powerful and robust animals.


Acclaimed for founding Abstract Expressionism, Mark Rothko (1903-1970), was a

Russian immigrant and a preeminent artist of his generation. His insatiable scholarly

quest and his fascination with concepts of mortality and spirituality deeply influenced

his art. Rothko’s tendency to place the darkest shades of his spare palette at the top

of his oversized canvases was meant to symbolize the mental depression that

plagued him, yet his late period obsession was dominated by color, adventure and

passion.


Picasso and Matisse have their 20th Century peer in Wassily Kandinsky

(1886-1944). Kandinsky believed that art could visually express music, and is

credited for painting the first modern abstractions. He was inspired by the radiantly

colorful churches and homes of his native Russia. In “Farbstudie Quadrate,” color

and rhythm make beautiful music together.