Today 16th December 2014 Google is celebrating the life and legacy for the second time of the world renowned painter and artists Wassily Kandinsky. If memory serves me correctly the previous Google Doodle for Wassily Kandinsky only appeared in the Google Russian Search Engines and todays one is being announced worldwide. Today’s Doodle is exactly the same as the one that Google Showcased on the 4th of December 2012. You can read more about the doodle at Wassily Kandinsky.
The reason we think Google might have selected to celebrate the painter Wassily Kandinsky twice may be due to the (OLD Style and the New Style of Dates). Old Style (O.S.) and New Style (N.S.) are sometimes used with dates to indicate either whether the start of the Julian year has been adjusted to start on 1 January (N.S.) even though documents written at the time use a different start of year (O.S.), or whether a date conforms to the Julian calendar (O.S.), formerly in use in many countries, rather than the Gregorian (N.S.).
According to Old Style Dates Wassily Kandinsky was born on the 4th of December 1866 and if you are following the New Style Dates then he was born on the 16th of December 1866.
Who was Wassily Kandinsky?
He was born in Russia on the 16th of December 1866 according to the New Style Date System and on the 4th of December according to the old date system. Wassily Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist.
He is credited with painting the first purely abstract works. Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman law) at the University of Dorpat where he began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.
Today’s Google Doodle is typically the type of abstract works Wassily Kandinsky painted. I could not confirm if the Doodle is a exact copy of his works, but found that it looks very similar to his Composition VIII 1923 oil on canvas painting.
In Composition 8, the colorful, interactive geometric forms create a pulsating surface that is alternately dynamic and calm, aggressive and quiet. The importance of circles in this painting prefigures the dominant role they would play in many subsequent works, culminating in his cosmic and harmonious image Several Circles. “The circle,” claimed Kandinsky, “is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.”
Wassily Kandinsky in the News
Recently Wassily Kandinsky made international headlines when one of his paintings sold for $23 million in New York, USA at a Christies Auction.
Among the most anticipated lots of the sale was Wassily Kandinsky’s Expressionist tour-de-force Studie für Improvisation 8, from the artist’s pioneering series of 1909, which achieved $23,042,500 and set a new world auction record for the artist.
For a more in-depth look at the life and legacy of Wassily Kandinsky visit the Wikipedia pages.
