Wassily Kandinsky vs. Claude Monet
Side-by-side comparison of two thinkers
Wassily Kandinsky
1866 – 1944
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist active in Germany during the late Belle Époque and Interwar eras. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in Western art. Born in Moscow, he began painting studies at the age of 30.
"If until now colour and form were used as inner agents, it was mainly done subconsciously. The subordination of composition to geometrical form is no new idea .…"
Claude Monet
1840 – 1926
Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter and founder of Impressionism who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of Impressionism's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions of nature, especially as applied to plein air (outdoor) landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise, which was exhibited in 1874 at the First Impressionist Exhibition, initiated by Monet and a number of like-minded artists as an alternative to the Salon.
"I am in a very black mood and profoundly disgusted with painting. It really is a continual torture! Don't expect to see anything new, the little I did manage to…"