Challenge Reference: Kandinsky and Miro

Paintings by the modern artists Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Joan Miro (1893-1983) show ideas for your abstract drawing using lines, shapes, and patterns. Click on pictures to enlarge.

Kandinsky was a very influential artist in Europe during the early 1900s and 20s. He believed that painting should let artists express their own inner lives in abstract, non-material ways. Just as musicians do not depend on the material world for their music, so artists should not depend on the material world for their art. His expressions with line, shapes, and color became the foundation of abstract art.



Miro's artwork was influenced by poetry in France, in the early 1920s. His goal was to to create pictorial poems using lines, shapes, colors, symbols, and words. His dream-like images were important influences on the art movement called Surrealism. Both Kandinsky and Miro were inspired by drawings by children and primitive art. As revolutionaries, both were determined to break the traditions of realism in art.