Hi! Today, I want to talk about what Wassily Kandinsky thought about Pablo Picasso.
Kandinsky was an abstract painter—often called the father of abstract art. He began creating abstract paintings around 1910 and was one of the first artists to exhibit them. However, Hilma af Klint had already created purely abstract paintings as early as 1906, though they weren’t shown to the public until 20 years after her death.
Kandinsky wrote a book that I’m currently reading called Concerning the Spiritual in Art. In this book, he shares his thoughts on Picasso.
You probably know Picasso—he’s a household name. Almost everyone in the world recognizes his work. Kandinsky had strong opinions about the artists of his time, and here’s what he specifically said about Picasso:
“In Cubism, the latest of the French movements, Picasso is trying to arrive at constructiveness by way of proportion. In his latest works, more or less 1911, he has achieved the logical destruction of matter—not, however, by dissolution, but rather by a kind of parceling out of its various divisions and a constructive scattering of those divisions about the canvas.”
I think what Kandinsky meant was that Picasso was exploring abstraction but wasn’t fully committing to it. There were still figurative elements in his work—shapes and forms that tied his paintings to something recognizable. Picasso couldn’t completely let go of representation.
Kandinsky, on the other hand, believed that abstract art should depict the spiritual—the unseen forces within and around us. His ideas later influenced other great abstract artists like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, who fully embraced abstraction as a way to represent the spirit rather than the figure.
So, what did Kandinsky think of Picasso? He admired him but felt that Picasso didn’t take abstraction far enough. Picasso experimented with it, especially in the summer of 1910, but ultimately decided to keep his work grounded in figurative elements.
Despite their differences, Kandinsky and Picasso respected each other. They agreed to disagree—something we, as artists, can appreciate.
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