TY  - JOUR
AU  - Galenson,David W.
TI  - Two Paths to Abstract Art: Kandinsky and Malevich
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12403
PY  - 2006
Y2  - August 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12403
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12403.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David Galenson
Department of Economics
University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL  60637
Tel: 773/702-8258
Fax: 773/702-8490
E-Mail: galenson@uchicago.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2006-08-07
AB  - Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich were both great Russian painters who became pioneers of abstract art during the second decade of the twentieth century. Yet the forms of their art differed radically, as did their artistic methods and goals. Kandinsky, an experimental artist, approached abstraction tentatively and visually, by gradually and progressively concealing forms drawn from nature, whereas Malevich, a conceptual innovator, plunged precipitously into abstraction, by creating symbolic elements that had no representational origins. The conceptual Malevich also made his greatest innovations considerably earlier in his life than the experimental Kandinsky. Interestingly, at the age of 50 Kandinsky wrote an essay that clearly described these two categories of artist, contrasting the facile and protean young virtuoso with the single-minded individual who matured more slowly but was ultimately more original.
ER  -