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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, fifth edition, a complementary color is “a color that combined with a given color makes white or black.” This is something you can test on your own. Use yellow, red, blue, green, orange, and purple. Mix two colors at a time in as many combinations as you can think of. What are your results?
To make the idea of complementary colors easier to understand, I am linking to a color wheel. Go look at it before you continue reading.
Complementary colors lay exactly opposite each other on the color wheel. In the simple color wheel you just look at, yellow is complementary to purple, red is complementary to green, and blue is complementary to orange.
When complementary colors are place next to each other, both look bright. This has been used to great effect in many paintings. Below, look at van Gogh’s use of red and green in Night Café (above).
Renoir’s use of blue and orange in Boating on the Seine.
Yellow and purple in Degas’ Woman Drying Her Hair. (This was painting at the end of Degas’ life when his eyesight had begun to fail.) Look how much more intense the yellow in the wall is than the red when placed against the purple of the woman’s body.
Try placing complementary colors side by side in your own painting and notice how bright the colors look.
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In 1927, the Nazis created a society that would control art. They said they were trying to prevent it from becoming dirty or corrupted. The Nazis wanted to create a society in which everyone looked alike and had like ideas and opinions. What better way to control thinking than to control art?
Imagine if the government decided to destroy any record of any music that wasn’t classical. And then they did it. Suddenly you couldn’t listen to anything with lyrics. There would be no more rock or hip hop or country or anything else. These music styles have helped to shape our culture and our ideas and after awhile I believe that our thinking would begin to change in their absence. This is what the Nazis were trying to do.
Anyway, they took more than 20,000 works of art, including paintings, drawings, and sculpture, by about 200 artists and chose 650 or so for their exhibit of “Degenerate Art.” The exhibit traveled around Germany, making 12 stops in large cities, before many of the works of art were destroyed.
The exhibit was set up to poke fun at the displayed works of art. The walls were often covered with graffiti, and the artists’ names and titles of paintings were sloppily handwritten on note cards next to the works. Click here to watch a short video clip of people looking at paintings in the Degenerate Art exhibit.
Several artists about whom you have already read, were included in the Degenerate Art exhibit, including Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian.
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Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866. He studied economics and law at the University of Moscow before becoming a professor. He was 30 before he went to Munich, Germany and began to truly study art. He focused, at first, on creating sketches and studies of human bodies. He settled in Germany after World War I where he taught art at the Bauhaus school and painted until the Nazis came into power. At that point (1933), he went back to France where he remained for the rest of his life.
On a somewhat-side note, the Nazis took some of Kandinsky’s paintings, displayed them in a collection of art they deemed inappropriate and unworthy, and then destroyed the paintings. The exhibition was called “Degenerate Art.” I will post more about this tomorrow.
Kandinsky’s earliest paintings were quite realistic. Then he moved into a style similar to that of the Impressionists before he began creating completely abstract paintings. Yesterday I used Monet’s Water Lilies to show this movement toward the abstract. Today, you can see that Kandinsky developed the same way except that Kandinsky became a truly abstract artist in the end. Check out Olga’s Kandinsky Gallery for pictures. All (or at least most) of his works are posted there in order. As you click through the pages, you can clearly see Kandinsky’s work become more and more abstract.
Kandinsky was especially interested in color, even as a child. Beginning in his earlier, more realistic paintings, Kandinsky used color to show emotion rather than to make objects look real. As he grew as an artist, Kandinsky became more concerned with the power of color in describing what he was feeling. He wanted to use color to make his viewers feel emotion, too.
Gradually, Kandinsky became more abstract. He began to paint objects as patches of color instead of painting perfect details such as facial features or individual leaves on trees. Remember that Kandinsky studied the human body and knew how to paint people well. He liked the abstract more than the realistic. As he grew as an artist, his figures became less realistic until the viewer could no longer identify known objects in his paintings.
Kandinsky was trying to create the same effect on a viewer of his paintings as a beautiful piece of music has on a listener. When you listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, for example, you don’t see snow or swirling fall leaves, or a muddy spring garden after a rain storm. You feel the seasons happening but you don’t actually see them. This is what Kandinsky was trying to do in his paintings.
Kandinsky’s ideas about art are possibly more important than even the paintings he created. He wrote three books about his ideas.
There are two Kandinsky projects posted at Art Projects for Kids. They both look pretty good but I’ve only tried this one, not this one. If you do either of the projects, please comment about your experience. I would love to hear about it and other readers would benefit from your comments as well. Happy creating!
EDITED TO ADD: Practice Geometry Using Kandinky's Art
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Beginning with the Impressionists at the end of the 1800s, art began to shift from realistic images to abstract images. In other words, artists became less concerned with painting a landscape and more concerned with the emotions a painting could stir in the viewer.
An excellent example of this development is Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series. In his first paintings of water lilies, Monet takes care to create realistic, recognizable lilies floating on a pond. By the end of his life, the lilies are hardly more than green smudges on a blue background, but the effect of the paintings (in my opinion) remains powerful. The first image is an early painting and the second is a late example of Monet's Water Lilies 
I would not claim that Monet was an abstract artist. This is just meant to illustrate the process of moving from art that shows recognizable subjects to art that does not.
An abstract artist whom you’ve read about already was Jackson Pollock. There are no fruit bowls in his splatter paintings. No stiffly posed women or shimmering ponds. He meant to do something more than record scenes. He meant to record emotion. Pollock looked inward at the chaos in his mind and laid it out on massive canvases so that we could feel what he felt.
In the next few days I’ll post about some other abstract artists. For now though, look back on my posts about Piet Mondrian and Pablo Picasso.
Please note that the term “abstract art” is very general. Cubism is a form of abstract art, as is neoplasticism (the movement Mondrian painted in), and many others.
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My final installment on art theft is a particularly interesting one, I think, and the crime occurred extremely recently. Click to read installments one, two, three, and four.
During the Holocaust and WWII, Nazis stole a lot of art. Much of it was taken from private collectors, especially Jewish collectors, before they were sent to concentration camps or were met with other unspeakable fates. Some of the art was returned to the rightful owners or the families of the rightful owners. Some was hidden away and has yet to be recovered. Some of the art remained the property of the thieves or entered public collections.
I could easily write a week’s worth of posts on this but in the interest of getting on to the point of today’s article, Emil George Buehrle was a Nazi supporter who created weapons for Hitler’s army during WWII. During this time, he amassed a great collection of art. We know that some of it was looted during the Holocaust because he had to return some of the paintings to the owners. It’s impossible to know where every piece came from but I think it’s safe to assume that at least a few of the paintings remaining in his collection were stolen to begin with.
Buehrle’s collection, housed in a townhome in Zurich, Switzerland, is open to the public for three hours on Sundays. Apparently, that is all the time thieves needed earlier this month to steal four masterworks by Cezanne, van Gogh, Monet, and Degas, valued at about $164 million.
Museums are not often targets of armed robbery which makes this an unusual case. While the gallery was still open to the public, masked gunmen entered, forced museum staff and the few remaining guests to lie on the floor, and took the paintings from the walls. Like in a TV bank robbery.
The paintings were probably ordered by a collector before the robbery but it’s possible the thieves are holding the paintings for ransom. Two of the works have been recovered (the Monet and the van Gogh), safe and still in their frames. The others are still missing. We’ll have to wait and see if the thieves make any demands.
And there you have it. Today you got two thefts in one story (that of the Nazis and that of the recent gallery robbers). That wraps up this series but I’ll come up with something interesting for next week.
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