 康定斯基 即兴3号 伦敦佳士得2013.6
成交价1350.18万英镑
作品介绍
Studie zu Improvisation 3 is a highly important work belonging
to a revolutionary series of paintings known as 'Improvisations'
that mark Wassily Kandinsky's first major forays into the realm of
abstraction.
It was in 1909, one of the crucial years of breakthrough in
Kandinsky's gradual progress towards the creation of a
non-material, non-objective and abstract art of the spirit, that
the artist began the first of his 'Improvisations'. These were the
very first paintings intended to convey, through spontaneously and
unconsciously created near-autonomous coloured forms, an inner
emotional response to and understanding of the visual phenomena of
the outer world.
 康定斯基 即兴3号 局部
1909 was the year that Kandinsky first began to divide his
most important paintings into three distinct categories:
'Impressions', 'Improvisations' and 'Compositions'. As he wrote in
the conclusion of his first great theoretical treatise at this
time, his book entitled Concerning the Spiritual in Art,
'Impressions' were paintings that conveyed 'the direct impression
of 'external nature', expr-essed in linear painterly form'.
'Improvisations' by contrast, were, 'chiefly unconscious'
creations. They were, 'for the most part', paintings that were
'suddenly arising expr-essions of events of an inner character,
[and were] hence impressions of [an] internal nature.' Less
spontaneous and intuitive, 'Compositions' were similar
'expr-essions of feeling that have been forming within me in a
similar way (but over a long period of time) which, after the first
preliminary sketches, I have slowly and almost pedantically
examined and worked out' (Wassily Kandinsky, 'On the Spiritual in
Art', in P. Vergo & K. Lindsay, eds., op. cit., p. 218).
 康定斯基 即兴3号 局部
The paintings that Kandinsky named 'Improvisations' therefore,
formed a central part of the artist's concerted attempt to bring
out what he described as the 'internal nature' or, the inner
'sound' of visual experience. Throughout 1909 Kandinsky painted
eight numbered 'Improvisations' and subsequently more than two
dozen others before the outbreak of the First World War. The
artist's friend, the art historian Will Grohmann noted of these
works that they 'occupy a special place' within the transitional
period 1910-12, being the works that 'come closest to the ideas he
asserted in Concerning the Spiritual in Art' (W. Grohman,
Kandinsky, New York, 1958, p. 116).
The scientific concept then being championed in the world of
modern physics, that matter was not a fixed entity but one that
could be transmuted into energy, was a powerful influence upon
artists such as Kandinsky and Franz Marc. It was a revelatory
concept that had 'powerfully transformed the human mind' Marc
argued and confirmed the validity of his and Kandinsky's search to
find a truer reality of the spirit residing behind the curtain of
appearances that represents our conventional picture of the
material world.
 康定斯基 即兴3号 局部
Kandinsky's 'Improvisations' are among the first paintings in
the history of art to mark the deliberate freeing of form and
colour from their conventional pictorial duties towards the
representation of the outward appearance of objects and things in
favour of a spiritual vision. 'The impossibility and, in art, the
purposelessness of copying an object, the desire to make an object
expr-ess itself, are the beginnings of leading the artist away from
'literary' colour to artistic, i.e. pictorial aims' Kandinsky had
argued in this respect (Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual
in Art, New York, 1947, p. 48). As a work like Studie zu
Improvisation 3 shows, it was in the 'Improvisations' that
Kandinsky first began to 'dissolve' the external and material forms
of a landscape scene and to develop and articulate a more
fantastical, inner, spiritual and holistic vision of the world as a
kind of cosmic soup of colliding spiritual forces and energies
symbolized by abstracted colour relationships. 'I dissolved
objects' Kandinsky said, 'to a lesser or greater extent within the
same picture, so that they might not all be recognized at once and
so that these emotional overtones might thus be experienced
gradually by the spectator, one after another. Here and there,
purely abstract forms entered of their own accord, which therefore
had to produce a purely pictorial effect without the
above-mentioned colouration' (Wassily Kandinsky, Cologne Lecture,
1914, quoted in P. Vergo & K. Lindsay, eds., op. cit., p.
396).
 康定斯基 即兴3号 局部
Acting like a conceit for such visual poetics, the
subject-matter of Kandinsky's 'Improvisations' all tended to be
founded on a set of similar motifs drawn from fairy-tales. In their
tonal range, their heightened and exuberant colour reflected the
exotic radiance that Kandinsky both admired in much non-European
art and which he had also witnessed first hand in Tunisia on a
visit there in 1904-05. Indeed, the very first of Kandinsky's
numbered Improvisations almost all depict Tunisian subjects and
motifs.
Improvisation 1 is known today only from a drawing.
Improvisation 2 (Moderna Museet, Stockholm) shows a procession of
figures and a rider on a white horse; it is subtitled Trauermarsch
('Funeral March'). The space in this and all of the other
'Improvisations' done in 1909 is simplified, very shallow and
stage-like. Their flattened natural forms in the background are
almost like stage sets that perhaps reflect Kandinsky's
collaboration in multi-media theatre projects such as The Yellow
Sound at this time as well as his elaborate plans for colour operas
in collaboration with the composer Thomas von Hartmann.
 康定斯基 即兴3号 局部
A study now in the Städtische Galerie in Munich preceded
Improvisation 2 and was approximately half the dimensions of the
final version. The same is true for Improvisation 3. Studie zu
Improvisation 3 is about half the size of the final version now in
the Centre George Pompidou, Paris. Will Grohmann had mistakenly
assumed that because the present work was signed by the artist and
dated 1910, it must have followed Improvisation 3 which Kandinsky
signed and dated 1909. In their catalogue raisonné of Kandinsky's
work however, Roethel and Benjamin have pointed out that this was
not the case, stating that Studie zu Improvisation 3 did in fact
precede the larger version; Kandinsky simply signed and dated the
present work at some later date. There is also the beginning of a
'fantasy' painting on the reverse of the board on which Studie zu
Improvisation 3 was executed. Vivian Endicott Barnett has dated
this verso work 1908-09. A prophet, half buried to his waist in the
green earth, declaims his message, as passersby shrink from this
bizarre sight and head off on their way. The paint must have been
still wet when Kandinsky decided to scrape the surface with his
palette knife to cancel the image; this appears to have been done
before the artist began painting the present Studie on the other
side.
 康定斯基 即兴3号 局部
Like most of the 'Improvisations', Improvisation 3 and Studie
zu Improvisation 3 are also founded on a pictorial theme that could
be seen to derive from both Tunisia and the middle ages. A fusion
of the radiant and heightened Tunisian light and colour common to
many of these paintings, Studie zu Improvisation 3 also centres on
one of Kandinsky's most frequently depicted motifs, a knight with a
lance on horseback. Here, the mounted rider is seen charging over a
white bridge towards a bright yellow fortress amidst a radiant
semi-abstract landscape of near free-form colour.
The motif of the horse and rider appears in numerous Kandinsky
paintings from this period, beginning with his famous Der blaue
Reiter of 1903, from which the artist's association that he founded
with Franz Marc in 1911 took its name. The motif stands as a symbol
of the Knight Errant and his pursuit of a sacred quest. In
particular, for Kandinsky, the rider often signifies the figure of
Saint George, Moscow's patron saint and a knight whose battle with
the dragon also symbolised for the Russian artist the victory of
the individual human spirit over the vast collective forces of
materialism.
 康定斯基 即兴3号 局部
The fact that the knight's horse in this work is pale green
has led to the suggestion that the figure may also symbolize the
fourth horseman of the Apocalypse as described in the Revelation of
Saint John. In the original Greek orthodox version of the Bible,
which would have been known to Kandinsky, a reader of the Russian
Orthodox New Testament, the fourth horseman is described as riding
a pale green horse. 'When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the
voice of the fourth living creature call out, 'Come!' I looked and
there was a pale green horse! Its rider's name was Death, and Hades
followed with him, they were given authority over a fourth of the
earth, to kill with sword, famine and pestilence, and by the wild
animals of the earth' (The Book of Revelation, 7.7)
 康定斯基 即兴3号 局部
Whatever the case, the Romantic image of a lone knight
preparing to storm the citadel, as represented by the rider
charging over the bridge towards the high yellow wall in this
painting, is a clear and oft-repeated symbol in Kandinsky's art of
the dawning of a new age, of the coming of the Apocalypse and of
the ultimate Resurrection of the spirit that would, Kandinsky
believed, inevitably follow it. The lone rider or Knight Errant in
this respect is a personalized symbol of Kandinsky's own personal
odyssey into abstraction and his mystic quest to herald the end of
the materialist age with a new art of the spirit. 'The great epoch
of the Spiritual which is already beginning, or, in embryonic form,
began already yesterday amidst the apparent victory of materialism,
provides and will provide the soil in which this kind of monumental
work of art must come to fruition. In every realm of the spirit,
values are reviewed as if in preparation for one of the greatest
battles against materialism. The superfluous is discarded, the
essential examined in every detail. And this is happening also in
one of the greatest realms of the spirit, that of pre-eternal and
eternal art' (Wassily Kandinsky, 'Content and Form', 1910-11, in P.
Vergo & K. Lindsay, eds., op. cit., p. 88).
 康定斯基 即兴3号 局部
相关资讯
6月18日晚，佳士得伦敦印象和现代艺术拍卖夜大获成功，拍卖总额达64,076,575英镑/ $100,407,993美元/
€75,225,899欧元，84%作品成功拍卖，87%超过预先估价。拍卖预估价为52,830,000~75,800,000英镑。
本次拍卖最高价格的作品是俄国表现主义画家瓦西里·康定斯基(Wassily Kandinsky,1866-1944)
1909年的巨作《Studie zu Improvisation 3》，拍卖价为£13,501,875英镑/
$21,157,438美元 /€15,851,201
欧元(估价1200~1600万英镑)。18件作品拍卖超过100万英镑，22件作品拍卖超过100万美元。2位艺术家建立了新的拍卖记录：他们是欧仁布丹(Eugène
Boudin)和康斯坦丁·布朗库西(Constantin Brancusi)。
康定斯基的大部分作品都来自他的“即席创作”系列，在重要的机构——包括巴黎的蓬皮杜中心展出。佳士得本次拍卖的《Studie
zu Improvisation
3》1909，曾在2012年11月拍卖以2300万美元创造了画家的拍卖记录。这幅作品属于康定斯基革命系列的绘画，在创作这幅作品的早些时候，画家开始了称为“即兴创作”，也是画家首次涉足抽象领域。他在绘画中传达了内在创作力量的感觉，是一种精神产品而不是外部景象或手工技巧的产品。它能使人得出一种完全没有主题的艺术，除非仅用色彩、线条以及它们之间的关系来形成这一主题。他写道：“色彩和形式的和谐，从严格意义上说必须以触及人类灵魂的原则为唯一基础。”
画家的意图，要通过线条和色彩、空间和运动，不要参照可见自然的任何东西，来表明一种精神上的反应或决断。
画家简介
瓦西里·康定斯基（Василий Кандинский，Wassily Kandinsky
，1866-1944），俄裔法国画家，杰出的艺术理论家、诗人、剧作家。康定斯基与彼埃·蒙德里安和马列维奇一起，被认为是抽象艺术的先驱，是世界公认的现代抽象绘画的创始人。瓦西里·康定斯基是现代艺术的伟大人物之一，同时也是现代抽象艺术在理论和实践上的奠基人。他在1911年所写的《论艺术的精神》、1912年的《关于形式问题》、1923年的《点、线到面》、1938年的《论具体艺术》等论文，都是抽象艺术的经典著作，是现代抽象艺术的启示录。
康定斯基的绘画作品多采用印象主义技法，又受野兽主义影响，被认为是抽象主义的鼻祖。主要作品均采用音乐名称，诸如《乐曲》、《即兴曲》、《构图2号》等。代表作组画《秋》、《冬》均用抽象的线、色、形的动感、力感、韵律感和节奏感来表述季节的情绪和精神。1921年以后因受至上主义和构成主义的影响，创作又由自由的、想象的抽象，转向几何的抽象，代表作如《白色的线》等。在以后的年代，他曾试图把抒情的抽象和几何的抽象有机结合起来，在几何形的结构与造型中，配以光和色，既充满幻想、幽默，也具有神秘色彩。
索罗门·古根海姆美术馆是康定斯基作品的最大藏家之一。
作品资料
Studie zu Improvisation 3
成交总额
GBP 13,501,875
估价
GBP 12,000,000 - GBP 16,000,000
拍卖 1131
Impressionist/Modern Evening Sale
伦敦|2013年6月18日
拍品 6
signed and dated 'KANDINSKY 1910' (lower
right)
oil and gouache on cardboard in the artist's painted
frame
17 5/8 x 25½ in. (44.7 x 64.7 cm)
Painted in 1909
来源
Hermann Lange, Krefeld.
Ulrich Lange, Krefeld, by descent from the above, and thence
by descent; sale, Christie's, New York, 6 November 2008, lot
48.
Acquired at the above sale by the present
owner.
展览历史
Munich, Neue Pinakothek, on loan 1972-2003.
Zurich, Kunsthaus, on loan 2004-2008.
相关文献
W. Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky, Life and Work, London, 1959,
no. 619, pp. 345 & 401 (illustrated; dated '1910').
H.K. Roethel & J.K. Benjamin, Kandinsky, Catalogue
Raisonné of the Oil-Paintings, vol. I, 1900-1915, London, 1982, no.
275, p. 263 (illustrated).
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