About the Cover Artist

The cover artwork is Impression III (Konzert),

a 1911 oil painting by Wassily Kandinsky. While he had been developing the intellectual scaffolding for his plunge into abstraction since 1909, it was only after a 1911 concert of the music of Arnold Schoenberg that he began working in earnest in that direction. Producing some sketches of the concert immediately afterward, he went on to dramatically simplify and abstract their shapes and contours, eventually producing the final painting and staking out the beginnings of a world-shaking artistic movement.

Taking its title from a translation of Kandinsky’s revolutionary 1911 essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the Festival’s seventy-sixth season will explore many strands of spiritual thought and practice through their connection to music. Kandinsky, a Russian-born painter and Theosophist who lived between Munich and Paris, forged the idea that abstract painting could inspire a durational and consciousness-shifting experience that was akin to music. Kandinsky’s view of spirituality as accessible through artistic material was central to the Bauhaus School, where he began teaching in 1922.

Kandinsky was born in Moscow on December 16, 1866. After studying law and economics, he moved to Munich to study art with Anton Azbe and Franz von Stuck. Kandinsky exhibited for the first time with the Berlin Secession in 1902 and with the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1904. Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art was published in December 1911, and shortly thereafter the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was published by Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Kandinsky lived in Russia from 1914 to 1921, principally in Moscow, until he began teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922. He moved with the Bauhaus to Dessau in 1925 and became a German citizen in 1928. The Nazi government closed the Bauhaus in 1933 and later that year Kandinsky settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. Fifty-seven of his works were confiscated by the Nazis in the 1937 purge of “degenerate art.” Kandinsky died on December 13, 1944, in Neuilly-sur-Seine.