Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons)
Vasily Kandinsky (Born Moscow (formerly Russian Empire, now Russia), 1866; died Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, 1944)
1913
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 111 × 111.3 cm (43 11/16 × 43 13/16 in.)
- Culture
- Germany
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Modern Art
- Credit line
- Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
In his 1912 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Vasily Kandinsky made an analogy between music and painting as two means of abstraction, a radical mode of artmaking that freed color and line from their traditionally representational functions. Between 1910 and 1914 he produced “improvisations,” works he described as unconscious, spontaneous expressions. Kandinsky commented on Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) in a letter to Arthur Jerome Eddy, a friend and collector from Chicago: “The cannons . . . could probably be explained by the constant war talk going on through the year [but] the true contents are what the spectator experiences while under the effect of the forms and color combinations of the picture.”
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
