In the early 1900s, chaos erupted across the world as rumors of a full-scale war spread. The artists were introduced to the Post-Impressionist art movement, where they moved away from realism and subject matter. The Post-Impressionists began to completely change the artistic style of the time by focusing on depicting emotions and communicating their inner thoughts. No work of art conveys these ideas better than Wassily Kandinsky's Composition VII from 1913. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayComposition VII is part of a series of compositions created over a period of years; it is one of the artist's last paintings that he created before the start of the Bauhaus movement in the late 1910s. The abstract oil painting is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Russia and its dimensions are 79 x 119 inches. At first glance, the piece appears to be a random integration of organic shapes, lines and colors. Upon further investigation, it will be discovered that the artist spent considerable time sketching preliminary designs before constructing the final arrangement over the course of three days. The large-scale nature of abstract painting combined with its visual complexity entices the viewer to become overwhelmed by the graphic stimulation. The viewer tends to follow the obvious diagonal alignment of the composition, leading the eye from the lower left to the upper right of the piece. According to Ulrike Becks-Malorny, a sense of balance is created within the painting, due to the contrast of chaotic shapes and hues in the upper half of the format compared to a more relaxed combination in the lower half. In Kandinsky's 1977 book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the artist spends a lot of time discussing his spiritual and psychological connection to form and color. He emphasizes that to nourish the soul, the world must turn away from materialism and art imitating nature. As Kandinsky's translator Michael TH Sadler stated, an artist's social duty is to be an educator of the human spirit and to guide the audience toward an ultimate understanding of the artist's actions. When it comes to what he believes should guide an artist, Kandinsky said that an “internal necessity” should be the deciding factor. In other words, Vassily considered his inner voice to be the most important factor when it came to creating artistic works. Although the Expressionists rejected formalist ideas, Kandinsky believed that the value of a painting is measured by what are called the formal elements of art; these elements include shape, line, color, form, pattern, composition, tone, and texture. Despite the artist's contradictions, he believed that the word "form" essentially described the manifestation of the artist's inner self. You might think that Kandinsky's Composition VII has no substance because it is entirely abstract, but in reality there turns out to be a lot of meaning behind the work. Along with several other artists of the time, Kandinsky was inspired by the constant threat of world war, which ultimately occurred a year after the painting's completion. Compared to Kandinsky's later pieces made in the 1920s, one can see that his style changed dramatically from creating messy and muddy compositions to more light and organized compositions. The artist himself said that Composition VII was the most compelling piece he created before the start of the First War..