Hey guys. I was in my apartment building’s basement and found a few framed paintings/prints that were left in the trash. Most of them were kinda boring repros, the sort you’d find in a Bed Bath & Beyond or other mass decor store, but two were interesting enough for me to snag for myself.
One was a cool architect’s rendering of a possible facade for a Florentine church. The other one is a modern painting (well, a reproduction I assume), and this is the one I’d like more info about. Trouble is, I know almost bupkis about modern art. I’ve uploaded a (rather crappy, sorry) image of the one that’s puzzling me.
There’s a signature/print # in the lower left corner that looks like LK / 25. My mind immediately went to “Kandinsky,” since the only other artists I know with “K” as a last name are Klimt or Klee, and it doesn’t look like their work, what little I’ve seen. But then where does the “L” come in? Is “L” a Polish representation for what the English transliterate as “W”?
Anyway, please help an art-impaired Doper out! Does anyone recognize this?
Ah! Thanks very much, y’all! Man, I know one modern art dude and it turns out he’s the right guy. (And I only really know him from the play/movie Six Degrees of Separation.)
That is a “V”?! Wow. Looks just like an L!
The colors in that website are way off, btw. The yellow and blue are far more … watery, I suppose. The blue is like the sky, and the yellow like butter. I’m not usually a fan of non-representational art (which is embarrassing to admit) but this piece, for some reason, really makes me happy.
Interesting. That’s a funny coincidence. I guess I saw the name “Wassily” and to me it looks Polish more than Russian. The “Vasily” spelling is the opposite. Kinda sad that I don’t know these things, since my various grandparents are all Russian and Polish.
picunurse, the version in Six Degrees was a mishmash of two separate Kandinskys, according to this NYTimes article. Apparently Kandinsky did make double sided painting but the “Chaos/Control” work mentioned by Guare was his invention, and the set designers would use two different Kandinsky works to create the version that’s so loved by the Kittereges in the play and film. In the movie, the designer had an artist recreate Black Lines (which I think represented ‘chaos’) and Several Circles (‘control’).
I love that movie. Oh and btw, after I posted this last night, I found another attractive Kandinsky repro in the bunch that were being thrown out, which I also grabbed: The Elephant. Like the other painting, it’s matted and framed beautifully. This one had KANDINSKY in big letters as a signature, so no mystery here. In fact, if I’d seen it earlier I would’ve been more certain that my other find was a Kandinsky too. I guess whoever tossed them really liked the artist! (I think the former owners moved out of the building, so maybe they didn’t want to bring them along. Their loss & my gain!)
Interesting to see the difference in his style in the two works. Of course one was painted nearly 20 years after the other.