I returned to the cemetary in search of Kandinsky’s grave (see my previous post) and, like last Saturday, I was the only person there. It was blazing hot. SO HOT that after half an hour I had to leave.  But not without taking a few more photos. In the end, I never did find Kandinsky’s final resting place. 

I find this man’s optimism, as expressed through his work, supremely uplifting.

Wassily Kandinsky, who was born in Moscow in December 1866 and died in France in December 1944, was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. Credited with painting the first purely abstract works, he went on to become the master of abstract expressionism. His work is hung in museums and public art galleries worldwide.

 

In 1896 Kandinsky settled in Munich and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Kandinsky was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Communist Moscow, and returned to Germany in 1921. There, he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived for the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939 and producing some of his most prominent art. He died in 1944.

The optimism just shines through his work here, not to mention his spirit of playfulness and freedom, liberated from the traditional constraints of the past. (This painting is titled Several Circles (1926) and can be found in New York City’s Guggenheim Museum).

Below are random photos of the cemetary – these yellow flowers are ceramic.

I can’t think of a more touching tribute of a husband’s love for his wife. Evelyne died at the age of 56.  Emiliano, ten years her senior, will be buried beside her when he dies. To my adored wife, love is stronger than death, I will love you for eternity.What is CT, I wonder.  Some sort of sect or secret society?And this is about as colourful as it gets here in autumn, at least in Paris and the outlying burbs.  I miss the dramatic autumn colours of Canada.