Inspired By Kandinsky

When Ethel Mars first saw woodblock prints by Wassily Kandinsky at the Salon d'Automne in 1906, the 28 year old American was still younger than the Russian Kandinsky had been when he began studying art in Munich. Mars, already successful, found much to admire in the older artist's work. Later, when Mars and her companion Maud Hunt Squire waited out World War I on Cape Cod with the Provincetown Printers, she told Blanche Lazzell that Kandinsky was the "grandfather" of their group.

Mars began experimenting with a two block technique in her prints, after seeing the Kandinsky works here. Using fewer blocks to make a print simplified some aspects of print making while offering new challenges.

The bravura elaboration of detail in the depiction of clothing seems to be another happy inspiration for Mars, whose work was often more streamlined. For Kandinsky, Munich was the place where he fell in love with the operas and their mythical stories by Richard Wagner.

From knights and symbolic ladies to Mars's bourgeois woman admiring a Paris shop window both color and mood lightened. Paris was the center of the art world then, but shoppers not gods walked Haussmann's boulevards.

You may also be interested in Mademoiselle Mars, posted here 25 August 2009.

Images:
1. Wassily Kandinsky - Promenade Gracieuse, 1904, Nina Kandinsky Estate.
2. Ethel Mars - Woman At A Shop Window, c. 1906, Indianapolis Museum of Art.
3. Wassily Kandinsky - By The Sea, 1903, Pompidou Center, Paris.
4. Wassily Kandinsky - Promenade, 1902, Pompidou Center, Paris.
5. Wassily Kandinsky - L'Eventail (The Fan), 1903, Pompidou Center, Paris.
6. Wassily Kandinsky - The Farewell, 1903, Pompidou Center, Paris.
7. Wassily Kandinsky - Summer, 1904, Pompidou Center, Paris.
8. Wassily Kandinsky - Two Young Girls, undated, Pompidou Center, Paris.
9. Wassily Kandinsky - Twilight, 1903, Pompidou Center, Paris.
10. Wassily Kandinsky - Les Corbeaux, 1907, Pompidou Center, Paris.
11. Wassily Kandinsky - Moonrise, c. 1903, Lanbauchaus, Munich, Germany

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