Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)

Kandinsky produced a total of ten large-format Compositions. Unlike his Impressions and his Improvisations, he viewed these as his most mature paintings, and they were of programmatic significance to his work as a whole. Between 1910 and 1914 Kandinsky was working out the principles of abstract composition without ever quite relinquishing figurative or representational motifs. Komposition IV, which Kandinsky also called The Battle, is one of the most important works in the development of abstraction. Kandinsky described his pictorial intentions in the essay 'Retrospective Definition': "The opposition of mass to line, of precision to vagueness, of knots of lines to knots of colour, and, main opposition: acute, sharp movements (battle) to pale-cold-sweet colours." ___