An elderly
character in an English novel would often send a picture postcard with a single line – ‘travelling and
learning’ !. In 2012, Christie's auctioned ‘Studie für Improvisation
8’ (Study for Improvisation 8), a 1909 view of a man wielding a broadsword in a
rainbow-hued village, for $23 million. The painting had been on loan to the
Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, since 1960 and was sold to a European
collector by the Volkart Foundation. For
many of us, the day starts with Computer
and Internet… searching many things and coming across more things – most of
which we may not remember.
And as we start the search
on ‘google’ – the doodle’s impress us and lead us to read of the person / thing
on which they are fashioned. Today,
Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky’s 148th birthday is celebrated in a Google
Doodle illustration. The artist, who is
credited with being the first painter to produce purely abstract works, used
colour as an expression of emotion, often likening the process of painting to
composing music.
Wassily Wassilyevich
Kandinsky [1866 – 1944] was an influential Russian painter and art theorist.
Born in Moscow, 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; he began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the
age of 30. Kandinsky was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in
Communist Moscow, and returned to Germany in 1921. He became a French citizen in 1939 and producing some of
his most prominent art. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seinein 1944. His career which spanned
five decades during which he was
influenced by - among other artistic movements - Impressionism, Fauvism,
Pointillism, Bauhaus architecture and abstract expressionism.
Fifty seven of his
paintings were confiscated by the Nazis during a raid on the Bauhaus art school
and were later put on show in the State-sponsored exhibit “Degenerate Art” in
1937 before being destroyed. Kandinsky was also a keen art theorist, publishing
his own book in 1912 called Concerning the Spiritual in Art, in which he set out
his theory on how colour could provoke a rich, sensory experience within the
soul of the viewer.
Google
doodles appear as Google logos on special occasions. Google has had several logos since its
renaming from BackRub. The founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin had nicknamed
their search engine ‘backrub’ as the system checked backlinks to estimate the
importance of a site. The doodles on
Google homepage are intended to provide more fun and enjoyment whilst searching
on Google. They are extremely popular among
the users and many eagerly await the release of
each new doodle.
~ not all of
them are Universal – some would appear in a few regions only – this is a map of
google doodle reach – perhaps this one is seen across all places !
With regards – S. Sampathkumar
16th Dec 2014.
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