Wassily Kandinsky

This book contains many photographic examples and drawing from Kandinsky’s works which offer the demonstration of his theoretical observations, and which allow the reader to reproduce in him the inner obviousness provided that he takes the time to look at those pictures with care, that he let them acting on his own sensibility and that he let vibrating the sensible and spiritual strings of his soul. For details of extinct varieties of football invented and/or played during the Middle Ages in Europe, see the medieval football article.. This is the work of the painter to listen to know these effects in order to produce paintings which are not just the effect of a random process, but the fruit of an authentic work and the result of an effort toward the inner beauty. The different codes are listed below and are described more fully in their own articles. The above of the basic plane corresponds to the looseness and to lightness, while the below evokes the condensation and heaviness. In other countries or regions within them, the word "football" may refer to American football, Australian rules football, Canadian football, Gaelic football, or one of the two codes of rugby football: rugby league or rugby union. Every part of the basic plane possesses an proper affective coloration which will influence on the tonality of the pictorial elements that will be drawn on it, which contributes to the richness of the composition which results from their juxtaposition on the canvas. However, even in the countries where football is the official name of association football, this name may be at odds with common usage.

Kandinsky even considers the basic plane as a living being that the artist "fertilizes" and of which he feels the "breathing". Of the 48 national FIFA affiliates in which English is an official or primary language, only five — Canada, the Marshall Islands, New Zealand, Samoa and the United States — use soccer in their name, while the rest use football. The artist possesses the intuition of this inner effect of the canvas format and dimensions, which he chooses according to the tonality he wants to give to his work. In most English-speaking countries, the word "football" usually refers to Association football, also known as soccer (soccer originally being a slang abbreviation of Association). This tonality is determined by the relative importance of theses horizontals and verticals lines, the horizontals giving a calm and cold tonality to the basic plane, while the verticals give it a calm and warm tonality. Because of this, much friendly controversy has occurred over the term football, primarily because it is used in different ways in different parts of the English-speaking world. The basic plane is in general rectangular or square, thus it is composed of horizontals and verticals lines which delimitate it and define it as an autonomous being which will serve as support to the painting communicating it its affective tonality. The word "football", when used in reference to a specific game can mean any one of those described above.

The angle formed by the angular line possesses as well an inner sonority which is warm and close to yellow for an acute angle (triangle), cold and similar to blue for an obtuse angle (circle) and similar to red for a right angle (square). This situation endured until 1948, when at the instigation of the French league, the Rugby League International Federation (RLIF) was formed at a meeting in Bordeaux. A force which deploys itself without obstacle as the one which produces a straight line corresponds to lyricism, while several forces which confront or annoy each other form a drama. However the rules of professional rugby varied from one country to another, and negotiations between various national bodies were required to fix the exact rules for each international match. A diagonal possesses by consequence a more or less warm or cold tonality according to its inclination according to the horizontal and to the vertical. In 1907, a New Zealand professional rugby team toured Australia and Britain, and as a result the New South Wales Rugby League was formed. The subjective effect produced by a line depends on its orientation : the horizontal line corresponds to the ground on which man rests and moves, to flatness, it possesses a dark and cold affective tonality similar with black or blue, while the vertical line corresponds to height which offers no support, it possesses on the opposite a luminous and warm tonality close from white and yellow. Rugby league rules diverged significantly from rugby union in 1906, with the reduction of the team from 15 to 13 players, and the introduction of the play the ball (heeling the ball back after a tackle).

A plane can be obtained by condensation, from a line rotated around one of its ends. However, the number of deaths and injuries did gradually decline. The produced linear forms can be of several types : a straight line which results from an unique force applied in a single direction, an angular line which results from the alternation of two forces with a different direction, or a curved or wave-like line produced by the effect of two forces acting simultaneously. The changes did not immediately have the desired effect, and 33 American football players were killed during 1908 alone. The line is the product of a force, it is a point on which a living force has been applied in a given direction, the force applied on the pencil or on the paint brush by the hand of the artist. The report of the meetings introduced many restrictions on tackling and two more divergences from rugby: the banning of mass formation plays, as well as the forward pass. It can be alone and isolated or on the opposite put in resonance with other points or with lines. However, Harvard University had just built a concrete stadium, objected and proposed instead legalisation of the forward pass.

The point is the most concise form, but according to its placement on the basic plane it will take a different tonality. One proposed change was a widening of the playing field. This form can be a square, a triangle, a circle, like a star or even more complex. The meetings are now considered to be the origin of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. So the point used by the painter is not a geometric point, it is not a mathematical abstraction, it possesses a certain extension, a form and a color. This occurred reputedly at the behest of President Theodore Roosevelt, who was considered to be a fancier of the game, but who had threatened to ban it, unless the rules were modified to reduce the numbers of deaths and disabilities. The point is in the practice a small stain of color put by the artist on the canvas. Consequently, a series of meetings was held by 19 colleges in 1905-06.

He doesn’t analyze them on an objective and exterior point of view, but on the point of view of their inner effect on the living subjectivity of the observer who looks them and let them acting on his sensibility. By the early 20th century in the USA, this had resulted in national controversy and American football was banned by a number of colleges. Kandinsky analyses in this writing the geometrical elements which compose every painting, namely the point and the line, as well as the physical support and the material surface on which the artist draws or paints and which he calls the basic plane or BP. Both forms of rugby and American football were noted at the time for serious injuries, as well as the deaths of a significant number of players. The red and the green form the third big contrast, the orange and the purple the fourth one. Eventually, to differentiate the two codes of rugby, the code played by clubs which remained members of national federations affiliated to the IRFB became known as Rugby Union. Mixed with blue, it moves away from man to give the purple, which is cooled red. The separate Lancashire and Yorkshire competitions of the NRFU merged in 1901, forming the Northern Rugby League, the first time the name Rugby League was used officially.

Mixed with yellow, it gains in warmth and gives the orange which possesses an irradiating movement on the surroundings. Within a few years the NRFU rules had started to diverge from the RFU, most notably with the abolition of the line out. Mixed with black, it leads to brown which is a hard color. In 1895 representatives of the northern clubs met in Huddersfield to form the Northern Rugby Football Union (NRFU), a professional competition. The red is a warmth color, very living, lively and agitated, it possesses an immense force, it is a movement in oneself. In Britain, by the 1890s, a long-standing Rugby Football Union ban on professional players was causing regional tensions within rugby football, as many players in northern England were working class and could not afford to take time off to train, travel, play and recover from injuries. The gray corresponds to immobility without hope; it tends to despair when it becomes dark and regains little hope when it lightens. Professionalism was beginning to creep into the various codes of football.

The mixing of white with black leads to gray, which possesses no active force and whose affective tonality is near that of green. The International Rugby Football Board (IRFB) was founded in 1886, but rifts were beginning to emerge in the code. That’s why any other color resonates so strongly on its neighbors. The prime example of this differentiation was the lack of an offside rule (an attribute which, for many years, was shared only by other Irish games like hurling, and by Australian rules football). The black is a nothingness without possibility, it is an eternal silence without hope, it corresponds to death. Davan's rules showed the influence of games such as hurling and a desire to formalise an Irish code of football distinct from Rugby and Association football. The white acts like a deep and absolute silence full of possibilities. The first Gaelic football rules were drawn up by Maurice Davan and published in the United Ireland magazine on February 7, 1887.

The white and the black form the second big contrast, which is static. The GAA sought to promote traditional Irish sports, such as hurling and to reject "foreign" (particularly English) imports. Clarity is a tendency to the white and obscurity a tendency to the black. There was no serious attempt to unify and codify Irish varieties of football, until the establishment of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 1884. The mixing of blue with yellow gives the total immobility and the calm, the green. Caid had begun to give way to a "rough-and-tumble game" which even allowed tripping. The blue is the typically celestial color which evokes a deep calm. The rules of the English FA were being distributed widely.

The yellow is the typically terrestrial color whose violence can be painful and aggressive. Trinity College, Dublin was an early stronghold of Rugby (see the Developments in the 1850s section, above). The yellow possesses an eccentric movement and the blue a concentric movement, a yellow surface seems to get closer to us, while a blue surface seems to move away. By the 1870s, Rugby and Association football had started to become popular in Ireland. The yellow and the blue form the first big contrast, which is dynamic. "Wrestling", "holding" opposing players, and carrying the ball were all allowed. The warmth is a tendency to yellow, the coldness a tendency to blue. Ferris, described two main forms of caid during this period: the "field game" in which the object was to put the ball through arch-like goals, formed from the boughs of two trees, and; the epic "cross-country game" which took up most of the daylight hours of a Sunday on which it was played, and was won by one team taking the ball across a parish boundary.

The first obvious properties we can see when we look at isolated color and let it act alone; it is on one side the warmth or the coldness of the colored tone, and on the other side the clarity or the obscurity of the tone. One observer, Father W. The art work is born from the inner necessity of the artist in a mysterious, enigmatic and mystic way, and then it acquires an autonomous life; it becomes an independent subject animated by a spiritual breath. Main article: History of Gaelic football. In the mid-19th century, various traditional football games, referred to collectively as caid, remained popular in Ireland, especially in County Kerry. This inner necessity is the right of the artist to an unlimited freedom, but this freedom becomes a crime if it is not founded on such a necessity. (The Canadian Rugby Union was not formed until 1965.) American football was also frequently described as "rugby" in the 1880s. Every form is the delimitation of a surface by another one; it possesses an inner content which is the effect it produces on the one who looks at it attentively. For example, the Canadian Rugby Football Union, founded in 1884 was the forerunner of the Canadian Football League, rather than a Rugby Union body.

He defines it as the principle of the efficient contact of the form with the human soul. One of these was that Canadian football, for many years, did not officially distinguish itself from rugby. The inner necessity is for Kandinsky the principle of the art and the foundation of forms and colors' harmony. Over the years Canadian football absorbed some developments in American football, but also retained many unique characteristics. But this effect can be much deeper and cause an emotion and a vibration of the soul, or an inner resonance which is a purely spiritual effect, by which the color touches the soul. successful tackles). When we look at colors on the painter's palette, a double effect happens : a purely physical effect on the eye, charmed by the beauty of colors firstly, which provokes a joyful impression as when we eat a delicacy. These were complemented in 1882 by another of Camp's innovations: a team had to surrender possession if they did not gain five yards after three downs (i.e.

During decadent periods, souls fall to the bottom of the Triangle and men only search for the external success and ignore purely spiritual forces. In 1880, Yale coach Walter Camp, devised a number of major changes to the American game, beginning with the reduction of teams from 15 to 11 players, followed by reduction of the field area by almost half, and; the introduction of the scrimmage, in which a player heeled the ball backwards, to begin a game. It is a spiritual Triangle which moves forward and rises slowly, even if it sometimes remains immobile. US colleges did not generally return to soccer until the early twentieth century. The point of the Triangle is constituted only by some individuals who bring the sublime bread to men. Princeton, Rutgers and others continued to compete using soccer-based rules for a few years before switching to the rugby-based rules of Harvard and its competitors. Kandinsky compares the spiritual life of the humanity to a large Triangle similar to a pyramid; the artist has the task and the mission of leading others to the top by the exercise of his talent. The convention decided that, in the US game, four touchdowns would be worth one goal; in the event of a tied score, a goal converted from a touchdown would take precedence over four touch-downs.

These are not scientific and objective observations, but inner observations radically subjective and purely phenomenological which is a matter of what the French philosopher Michel Henry calls the absolute subjectivity or the absolute phenomenological life. However, a touch-down (as it was also known in rugby football at the time) only counted toward the score if neither side kicked a field goal. So it is a purely subjective form of experience that everyone can do and repeat taking the time to look at his paintings and letting acting the forms and the colors on his own living sensibility. In 1876, at the Massasoit Convention, it was agreed by these universities to adopt most of the Rugby Football Union rules. The analysis made by Kandinsky on forms and on colors don’t result from simple arbitrary ideas associations, but from the inner experience of the painter who has passed years creating abstract paintings of an incredible sensorial richness, working on forms and with colors, observing for a long time and tirelessly his own paintings and those of other artists, noting simply their subjective and pathetic effect on the very high sensibility to colors of his artist and poet soul. Within a few years, however, Harvard had both adopted McGill's rugby rules and had persuaded other US university teams to do the same. Works by Kandinsky have been recently sold for as much as US$25 million. This made it easy for Harvard to adapt to the rugby-based game played by McGill and the two teams alternated between their respective sets of rules.

As a synaesthete, he named some of his paintings "improvisations" and "compositions" as if they were works of music and not painting. At the time, Harvard students are reported to have played the "Boston Game" — a running code — rather than the FA-based kicking games favored by US universities. Along with Piet Mondriaan and Kazimir Malevich, Kandinsky is considered a pioneer in abstract art (to the extent that a Monty Python song refers to him as having "laid down (its) axioms"). Modern American football grew out of a match between McGill University of Montreal, and Harvard University in 1874. All the works in her possession have been legated to the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris, where we can see the largest collection of his paintings. This is also often considered to be the first US game of college football, in the sense of a game between colleges (although the eventual form of American football would come from rugby, not soccer). From the death of Wassily Kandinsky and during thirty years, Nina Kandinsky has never stopped to diffuse the message and to divulge the work of her husband. The first match generally said to have occurred under English FA (soccer) rules in the USA was a game between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869.

One should not be content with a brief and casual impression, or make a coarse identification of the forms used by the artist; forms which have been subtly harmonized and placed so as to resonate with the observer's own soul. The game gradually gained a following, and the Montreal Football Club was formed in 1868, the first recorded football club in Canada. In Kandinsky’s works, some characteristics are obvious while certain touches are more discrete and veiled; that’s to say they reveal themselves only progressively to those who make the effort to deepen their connection with his work. However, the first game of "rugby" in Canada is generally said to have taken place in Montreal, in 1865, when British Army officers played local civilians. The small squares of colors and the colored bands seem to stand out against the black background of Composition X, as stars' fragments or filaments, while enigmatic hieroglyphs with pastel tones cover the large maroon mass, which seems to float in the upper left corner of the canvas. Bethune devised rules based on the Rugby School game. Composition IX is a painting with highly contrasted powerful diagonals and whose central form give the impression of a human embryo in the womb. Barlow Cumberland and Frederick A.

In 1936 and 1939 he painted his two last major compositions; canvases particularly elaborate and slowly ripped that he hadn't produced for many years. In 1864, at Trinity College, Toronto, F. This period corresponds, in fact, to a vast synthesis of his previous work, of which he used all elements, even enriching them. The club may have invented the "Boston Game", a running code which was being played several years later in Massachusetts. He also used sand mixed with colour to give a granular texture to his paintings. However, the rules that the Oneida club used are also unknown, and it was formed before the FA rules were formulated. He used original colour compositions which evoke Slavonic popular art, and which look like precious watermark works. It has often been said that this club was the first to play soccer outside Britain.

Biomorphic forms with supple and non-geometric outlines appear in his paintings; forms which suggest externally microscopic organisms but which always express the artist's inner life. The first "football club" in the USA was the short-lived Oneida Football Club in Boston, Massachusetts, founded in 1862. He lived in a small apartment, and created his work in a studio constructed in the living room. A football club was formed at the university soon afterwards, although its rules of play at this stage are unclear: it is not known whether they played a kicking or handling game, or both, and its members mostly played against each other. In Paris, he was quite isolated, since abstract painting, particularly geometric abstract painting, was not recognized : the artistic fashions being mainly impressionism and cubism. The first documented football match in Canada was a game played at University College, University of Toronto on November 9, 1861. Kandinsky then left Germany and settled in Paris. In 1827, a Harvard University student composed a humorous epic poem called The Battle of the Delta, one of the first accounts of football in American universities.

The school pursued its activities in Berlin until its dissolution in July 1933. By the 1820s, a game known as Ballown was being played at the College of New Jersey (later known as Princeton University) and Old Division Football was being played at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. Following a fierce slander campaign from the Nazis, the Bauhaus closed at Dessau in 1932. As was the case in Britain, by the early 19th century, North American schools and universities played their own local games, between sides made up of students. In front of the hostility of the right political parties, the Bauhaus left Weimar and settled in Dessau from 1925. (Ironically, Blackheath now lobbied to ban hacking.) The first official RFU rules were adopted in June 1871. This simple visual identification of forms and of the main colored masses present on the canvas only corresponds to a first approach of the inner reality of the work whose right appreciation necessitates a much deeper observation- not only of forms and colors involved in the painting, but also of their relation, their absolute position and their relative disposition on the canvas, of their whole and reciprocal harmony. However, there was no generally accepted set of rules for rugby until 1871, when 21 clubs in England came together to form the Rugby Football Union (RFU).

The large two meter width painting that is Yellow – red – blue (1925) consists of a number of main forms: a vertical yellow rectangle, a slightly inclined red cross and a large dark blue circle, while a multitude of straight black or sinuous lines, arcs of circles, monochromatic circles and scattering of colored checkerboards contribute to its delicate complexity. There were also "rugby" clubs in Ireland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The freedom of which is characterised in each of his works by the treatment of planes rich in colors and magnificent gradations as in the painting Yellow – red – blue (1925), where Kandinsky shows his distance from constructivism and suprematism movements whose influence was increasing at this time. In Britain, by 1870, there were about 75 clubs playing variations of the Rugby School game, including Blackheath (founded in 1858 and arguably the world's oldest surviving, non-university rugby club). This period was a period of intense production. These first FA rules still contained elements that are recognisable in other games for instance, a player could make a fair catch and claim a mark and if a player touched the ball behind the opponents' goal line, his side was entitled to a free kick at the goal 15 yards from the goal line. Geometrical elements took on increasing importance in his teaching as well as in his painting, particularly circle, half-circle, the angle, straight lines and curves. After the final meeting on 8 December the FA published the "Laws of Football", the first comprehensive set of rules for the game later known as Association football (or, colloquially, soccer).

The development of his works on forms study, particularly on point and different forms of lines, lead to the publication of his second major theoretical book Point and Line to Plane in 1926. The motion was carried nonetheless but at the final meeting, Campbell withdrew his club from the FA. Kandinsky taught the basic design class for beginners, the course on advanced theory as well as conducting painting classes and a workshop where he completed his colors theory with new elements of form psychology. He said, "hacking is the true football". Its objectives included the merging of plastic arts with applied arts, reflected in its teaching methods based on the theoretical and practical application of the plastic arts synthesis. Campbell, the representative from Blackheath and the first FA treasurer, objected strongly. The Bauhaus was an architecture and innovative art school. W.

The next year, the Soviets have officially forbidden all forms of abstract art, having judged it as harmful for socialist ideals. Most of the delegates were favourable to this suggestion but F. In 1921 Kandinsky receives the mission to go to Germany to attend the Bauhaus of Weimar, on the invitation of its founder, the architect Walter Gropius. At the fifth meeting a motion was proposed that these two rules be expunged from the FA rules. In 1916 he meets Nina Andreievskaia who in the following year, becomes his wife. The two contentious draft rules were as follows:. He paints little during this period. The Cambridge rules differed from the draft FA rules in two significant areas; namely 'running with the ball' and 'hacking' (kicking an opponent in the shins).

He devotes his time to artistic teaching with a program based on forms and colors analysis, as well as participating in the organization of the artistic culture Institute at Moscow. At the beginning of the fourth meeting, attention was drawn to the fact that a number of newspapers had recently published the Cambridge Rules of 1863. During the years 1918 to 1921, Kandinsky deals with the cultural development politic of Russia, he collaborates in the domains of art pedagogy and museum reforms. At the close of the third meeting, a draft set of rules were published that most of the delegates were happy to endorse, but this agreement was not to last. He believed that color could be used in a painting as something autonomous and apart from a visual description of an object or other form. In total, six meetings were held between October and December 1863. Kandinsky's writing in The Blue Rider Almanac and the treatise On the Spiritual In Art, which was released at almost the same time, served as both a defense and promotion of abstract art, as well as an appraisal that all forms of art were equally capable of reaching a level of spirituality. Rugby, Eton and Winchester did not even reply.

More of each were planned, but the outbreak of World War I in 1914 ended these plans and sent Kandinsky home to Russia via Switzerland and Sweden. With the exception of Thring at Uppingham, most schools declined. The group released an almanac, also called The Blue Rider and held two exhibits. The first meeting resulted in the issuing of a request for representatives of the public schools to join the association. Kandinsky then moved to form a new group The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) with like minded artists such as Franz Marc. The aim was to produce a single code of football that everybody could agree to and to set up a governing body for the regulation of the game. The group was unable to integrate the more radical approach of those like Kandinsky with more conventional ideas of art and the group dissolved in late 1911. Charterhouse was the only school represented at that first meeting.

He helped to found the Munich New Artists' Association in and became its president in 1909. The meeting had been called, not by public school figures, but by members of several football clubs in the London Metropolitan area. In addition to painting Kandinsky developed his voice as an art theorist. It was the world's first official football body. Kandinsky used sometimes musical terms to designate his works : he called many of his most spontaneous paintings "improvisations", while he entitled "compositions" some others much more elaborated and worked at length, a term which resonated in him like a prayer. On the evening of October 26, 1863 at the Freemason's Tavern in Great Queen Street, London, The Football Association (FA) met for the first time. The influence of music has been very important on the birth of abstract art, as it is abstract by nature and as it doesn’t try to represent vainly the exterior world but simply to express in an immediate way the inner feelings of the human soul. This later revised version of the Cambridge Rules rules were to form the basis of what eventually became the rules adopted by The Football Association (FA).

The paintings of this period are composed of large and very expressive colored masses evaluate independently from forms and lines which serve no longer to delimitate them or to bring them out but which combine between them, are superimposed and overlap in a very free way to form paintings of an extraordinary force. In early October of 1863 a new revised set of Cambridge Rules rules were drawn up by a seven man committee representing former pupils from Harrow, Shrewsbury, Eton, Rugby, Marlborough and Westminster. The broad use of color in The Blue Mountain, illustrate Kandinsky's move towards art in which the color itself is presented independently of form. Thring, who had been one of the driving forces behind the original Cambridge Rules, was now a master at Uppingham School and he issued his own rules of what he called "The Simplest Game" (these are also known as the Uppingham Rules). The face, clothing, and saddles of the riders are each of a single color, and neither they or the walking figures display any real detail. C. A procession of some sort with three riders and several others crosses at the bottom. In 1862, J.

A mountain of blue is flanked by two broad trees, one yellow, and one red. The official name of the code is now Australian football. The Blue Mountain (1908 – 1909) painted at this time shows more of his trend towards pure abstraction. By 1866, however, several other clubs in the Colony of Victoria had agreed to play an updated version of the Melbourne FC rules, which were later known as "Victorian Rules" and/or "Australasian Rules". From 1906 to 1908 Kandinsky spent a great deal of time travelling across Europe, until he came to live in the small Bavarian town of Murnau. Australian Rules is sometimes said to be the first form of football to be codified but — as was the case in all kinds of football at the time, there was no official body supporting the rules — and play varied from one club to another. In and of itself The Blue Rider is not exceptional in that regard when compared to contemporary painters, but it does show the direction that Kandinsky would take only a few years later. The 1859 rules did not include some elements which would soon become important to the game, such as the requirement to bounce the ball while running.

Kandinsky shows the rider more as a series of colors than of specific details. The club had a strong and long-standing association with the Melbourne Cricket Club and cricket ovals — which vary in size and are much larger than the fields used in other forms of football — became the standard playing field. Indeed, some believe that a second figure, a child perhaps, is being held by the rider though this could just as easily be another shadow from a solitary rider. However, running while holding the ball was allowed and although it was not specified in the rules, an oval ball (like those later used in rugby) was used. The Blue Rider in the painting is prominent, but not clearly defined, and the horse has an unnatural gait (which Kandinsky must have known). A free kick was awarded for a mark (clean catch). In the foreground are more amorphous blue shadows, presumably the counterparts of the fall trees in the background. These men had similar backgrounds to Wills and their code also had pronounced similarities to the Sheffield rules, most notably in the absence of an offside rule.

The rider's cloak is a medium view, and the shadow cast is a darker blue. Harrison). Perhaps the most important of Kandinsky's paintings from the decade of the 1900s was The Blue Rider (1903) which shows a small cloaked figure on a speeding horse rushing through a rocky meadow. A. Yet the horse is muted, while the leaves in the trees, the town, and the reflections in the river glisten with spots of color and brightness. C. Riding Couple (1907) depicts a man on horseback, holding a woman with tenderness and care as they ride past a Russian town with luminous walls across a river. Thompson and Thomas Smith (some sources include H.

An exception is Sunday, Old Russia (1904) where Kandinsky recreates a highly colorful (and no doubt fanciful) view of peasants and nobles before the walls of a town. B. For the most part, however, Kandinsky's paintings did not emphasize any human figures. Hammersley, J. This changes at the beginning of the 20th Century and much remains of the many landscapes and towns that he painted, using broad swathes of color but recognizable forms. J. Unfortunately very little exists of his work from this period, though presumably it was extensive. They were drawn up at the Parade Hotel, East Melbourne on May 17, by Wills, W.

Kandinsky's time at art school was helped by the fact that he was older and more settled than the other students and he began to emerge as a true art theorist in addition to being a painter. The club's rules of 1859 are the oldest surviving set of laws for Australian Rules. Kandinsky's book 'Concerning the Spiritual In Art' (1910) and 'Point and Line to Plane' (1926) echoed this basic Theosophical tenet. The Melbourne Football Club was also founded in 1858 and is the oldest surviving Australian football club, but the rules it used during its first season are unknown. The creative aspect of the forms is expressed by the descending series of circles, triangles, and squares. It appears that Australian Rules also has some similarities to the Indigenous Australian game of Marn Grook (see above). Theosophical theory postulates that creation is a geometrical progression, beginning with a point. There were pronounced similarities between Wills's game and Gaelic football (as it would be codified in 1887).

Blavatsky (1831-91), the most important exponent of Theosophy in modern times. The extent to which Wills was directly influenced by British and Irish football games is unknown, but there were similarities between some of them and his game. P. Wills had been educated in England, at Rugby School and had played cricket for Cambridge University. Kandinsky was also spiritually influenced by H. Tom Wills began to develop Australian Rules football in Melbourne during 1858. Also in 1896, prior to leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of Monet and was particularly taken with a depiction of a haystack which, to him, had a powerful sense of color almost independent of the object itself. (For more details see: Oldest football clubs.).

It was not until 1896, at the age of 30, Kandinsky gave up a promising career teaching law and economics to enroll in art school in Munich. By the end of the 1850s, many clubs had been formed throughout the English-speaking world, to play various codes of football. Kandinsky would write a few years later that 'Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with the strings'. In 1867 the Sheffield Football Association was formed by a number of clubs in the local area and the Sheffield clubs continued to play by their own rules until they decided to fall in line with the FA in 1878.). His study of the folk art in the region, in particular the use of bright colors on a dark background was reflected in his early work. (How long this set of rules lasted is unclear, but by 1866, when Sheffield played a combined FA side, they were employing their own version of offside that differed from the FA rule. He tells in Looks on the past that he had the impression to move into a painting when he entered in the houses or the churches decorated with the most shimming colors. There were some similarities to the Cambridge Rules, but players were allowed to push or hit the ball with their hands, and there was no offside rule at all, so that players known as 'kick throughs' could be permanently positioned near the opponents' goal.

In 1889 he was part of an ethnographic group that traveled to the Vologda region north of Moscow. Creswick and Prest devised their own version of football: the Sheffield Rules. The fascination with color continued as he grew up in Moscow, although he seems to have made no attempt to study art. It was founded by former Harrow School pupils Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest, in 1857. This is probably due to his synaesthesia which allowed him to quite literally hear as well as see color. Sheffield Football Club also has a claim to be the world's oldest football club, in the sense of a club not attached to a school or university. As a child he would later recall being fascinated and unusually stimulated with color. Dublin University Football Club — founded at Trinity College, Dublin in 1854 and later famous as a bastion of the Rugby School game — is arguably the world's oldest football club in any code.

Kandinsky's youth and life in Moscow brought inspiration from a variety of sources. The increasing interest and development of the various English football games was shown in 1851, when William Gilbert, a shoemaker from Rugby, exhibited both round and oval-shaped balls at the Great Exhibition in London. Kandinsky biographer Messer divides his art into three periods:. However, the Cambridge Rules were not widely adopted. Artistic scholar Hajo Duechting has divided Kandinsky's artistic development into six periods:. Handling was only allowed for a player to take a clean catch entitling them to a free kick and there was a primitive offside rule, disallowing players from "loitering" around the opponents' goal. He called this devotion to inner beauty, fervor of the spirit and deep spiritual desire inner necessity, which was a central aspect of his art. The rules clearly favour the kicking game.

The creation by Kandinsky of purely abstract work did not arrive as an abrupt change, but rather as the fruit of a long development and maturation of intense theoretical thought based on his personal experience of painting. No copy of these rules now exists, but a revised version from circa 1856 is held in the library of Shrewsbury School. . An eight-hour meeting produced what amounted to the first set of modern rules, known as the Cambridge Rules. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944. Thring, who were both formerly at Shrewsbury School, called a meeting at Trinity College, Cambridge with 12 other representatives from Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester and Shrewsbury. He lived the rest of his life there, becoming a French citizen in 1939. J.C.

At that time he moved to France. de Winton and Mr. There he was a teacher at the Bauhaus from 1922 until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933. H. Being in conflict with official theories on art, he returned to Germany in 1921. In 1848 at Cambridge University, Mr. He went back to Moscow in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. While local rules for athletics could be easily understood by visiting schools, it was nearly impossible for schools to play each other at football, as each school played by its own rules.

In 1896 he settled in Munich and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. Inter-school sporting competitions became possible. Although quite successful in his profession, he started painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30. The boom in rail transport in Britain during the 1840s meant that people were able to travel further and with less inconvenience than they ever had before. He enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose law and economics. This further assisted the spread of the Rugby game. Kandinsky was born in Moscow but spent his childhood in Odessa. These were the first set of written rules (or code) for any form of football.

One of the most important 20th-century artists, alongside Picasso and Matisse, he is credited with painting the first abstract works in the history of modern art. In 1845, three boys at Rugby School were tasked with codifying the rules then being used at the school. Wassily Kandinsky (Russian: Василий Кандинский, first name spelled as [vassi:li]) (December 4, 1866 (O.S., December 16, 1866 N.S.) – December 13, 1944) was a Russian-born French painter and art theorist. However, some have argued that this club is too poorly documented to be considered to have existed since that time. In such a way that the Kandinskian equation, to which we have alluded to, can be written in reality as follows : Interior = interiority = invisible = life = pathos = abstract." (Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible, on Kandinsky). The club is said to have played the Rugby School game. "Kandinsky calls abstract the content that painting must express, that’s to say this invisible life that we are. For example, it is said that the world's first "football club" (that is one which was not part of a school or university), was the Guy's Hospital Football Club, founded in London in 1843.

When on the opposite two forces are in presence and enter in conflict, as this is the case with the curve or with the angular line, we are in the drama." (Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible, on Kandinsky). During this period, the Rugby School rules appear to have spread at least as far, perhaps further, than the other schools' games. That’s because the straight line proceeds from the action of a unique force with no opposition that its domain is lyricism. At Charterhouse and Westminster the boys were confined to playing their ball game within the cloisters making the rough and tumble of the handling game difficult. The pathos of a force entering in action and whose victorious effort is annoyed by no obstacle, that’s lyricism. The division into these two camps was partly the result of circumstances in which the games were played. "Kandinsky has been fascinated by the expression power of linear forms. Some favoured a game in which the ball could be carried (as at Rugby, Marlborough and Cheltenham), whilst others preferred a game where kicking and dribbling the ball was promoted (as at Eton, Harrow, Westminster and Charterhouse).

In this way the painted work is coupled with an ensemble of texts that enlighten it and that make at the same time of Kandinsky one of the major theorists of the art." (Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible, on Kandinsky). Soon, two schools of thought about how football should be played had developed. "[Kandinsky] has not only produced a work whose sensorial magnificence and invention richness eclipses those of its most remarkable contemporaries ; he has given moreover an explicit theory of abstract painting, exposing its principles with the highest precision and the highest clarity. However, by 1841 (some sources say 1842), running with the ball had become acceptable at Rugby, as long as a player gathered the ball on the full or from a bounce, he was not offside and he did not pass the ball. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key then another to cause vibration of the soul." -Wassily Kandinsky. In 1823 William Webb Ellis, a pupil at Rugby School, is said to have "showed a fine disregard for the rules of football, as played in his time" by picking up the ball and running to the opponents' goal, but the evidence for this bold act does not stand up to close examination. "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. Each school drafted their own rules as they saw fit and they often varied widely and were changed over time with each new intake of pupils.

The dead matter is a living spirit." (article entitled On the question of the form). Football had come to be adopted by a number of public schools as a way of encouraging competitiveness and keeping youths fit. It constitutes a cosmos of things exerting a spiritual action. These gradually evolved into the modern football games that we know today. "The world is full of resonances. Thus the public school boys, who were free from constant toil, became the inventors of organised football games with formal codes of rules. They brought me a joy which shattered me until the bottom of the soul, and which reached until ecstasy." (Looks on the past). Feast day football on the public highway was at an end.

These impressions renewed every sunny day. They had neither the time nor the inclination to engage in sport for recreation and, at the time, many children were part of the labour force. […] Rendering this hour seemed the biggest, the most impossible of the happiness for an artist. By the early 19th century, (before the Factory Act of 1850), most working class people in Britain had to work six days a week, often for over twelve hours a day. […] The sun dissolves all Moscow in a spot which, as a frenzied tuba, makes entered into vibration all the inner being, the whole soul. Frankland also mentions the "Football Fields" at Eton. The sun is already low and has reached its highest force, which it has searched all the day, to which it has aspired all the day. Nugae Etonenses (1766) by T.

"In this painting, I was in fact in quest for a certain hour, which was and which remains always the most beautiful hour of the day in Moscow. He describes how "...we may play quoits, or hand-ball, or bat-and-ball, or football; these games are innocent and lawful...". The variation in lines depends upon the number of these forces and upon their combinations." (Point and line to plane). The first specific mention of football can be found in a Latin poem by Robert Matthew, a Winchester scholar from 1643 to 1647. […] The forces coming from without which transform the point into a line, can be very diverse. Horman had been headmaster at Eton College and Winchester and his Latin textbook includes a translation exercise with the phrase "We wyll playe with a ball full of wynde". Here, the leap out of the static to the dynamic occurs. The earliest evidence that games resembling football were being played at English public schools — attended by boys from the upper, upper-middle and professional classes — comes from the Vulgaria by William Horman in 1519.

It is created by movement – specifically through the destruction of the intense self-contained repose of the point. (The Duke also presented the ball before the match — a ritual that continues to this day.) In 1835, the British Highways Act banned the playing of football on public highways, with a maximum penalty of forty shillings. It is the track made by the moving point; that is, its product. In 1827, the annual Alnwick Shrove Tuesday game proceeded only after the Duke of Northumberland provided a field for the game to be played on. "The geometric line is an invisible thing. Even in the early modern era, efforts were made to ban football at a local level, and force it off the streets. It belongs to language and signifies silence." (Point and line to plane). Charles II of England gave the game royal approval in 1681 when he attended a fixture between the Royal Household and the Duke of Albemarle's servants.

The geometric point has, therefore, been given its material form, in the first instance, in writing. In the period following the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell had some success in suppressing football games, although they became even more popular following the Restoration, in 1660. […] Thus we look upon the geometric point as the ultimate and most singular union of silence and speech. ("Spurn" literally means to kick away, thus implying that the game involved kicking a ball between players.). Considered in terms of substance, it equals zero. Shakespeare also mentions the game in A Comedy of Errors (Act II Scene 1):. Therefore, it must be defined as an incorporeal thing. Shakespeare's play King Lear (which was first published in 1608) contains the line: "Nor tripped neither, you base football player" (Act I Scene 4).

"The geometric point is an invisible thing. That same year, the modern spelling of the word "football" is first recorded, when it was used disapprovingly by William Shakespeare. These two ways are not arbitrary, but are bound up with the phenomenon – developing out of its nature and characteristics : Externally – or – inwardly." (Point and line to plane). By 1608, the local authorities in Manchester were complaining that:. "Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. All of these attempts failed to curb the people's desire to play the game. Is beautiful what is inwardly beautiful." (On the Spiritual In Art). Despite evidence that Henry VIII of England played the game — in 1526, he ordered the first known pair of football boots — in 1540 Henry also attempted a ban.

"Is beautiful what proceeds from an inner necessity of the soul. In Scotland, football was banned by James I in 1424 and by James II in 1457. It is the language which speaks to the soul, in its proper form, of things which are the daily bread of the soul and which it can receive only under this form." (On the Spiritual In Art). In England, the outlawing of sport was attempted by Richard II in 1389 and Henry IV in 1401. "Painting is an art, and the art in its whole is not a vain objets creation which get lost in the void, but a power which has a goal and must serve to the evolution and to the refinement of the human soul, to the moving of the Triangle. In France it was banned by Phillippe V in 1319, and again by Charles V in 1369. The artist which lets its gifts unemployed is the lazy servant." (On the Spiritual In Art). Football featured in similar attempts by monarchs to ban recreational sport across Europe.

The innate feeling of the artist is like the talent of the Gospel which must not be buried. The reasons for the ban by Edward III, on June 12, 1349, were explicit: football and other recreations distracted the populace from practicing archery, which was necessary for war, and after the great loss of life that had occurred during the Black Death, England needed as many archers as possible. As a neglected body which becomes weak and finally impotent, the spirit becomes weaker. King Edward II was so troubled by the unruliness of football in London that on April 13, 1314 he issued a proclamation banning it:. "But, as well as the body, the spirit fortifies itself and develops itself by the exercise. Between 1324 and 1667, football was banned in England alone by more than 30 royal and local laws. Late Period: from the 1930s until 1944. Numerous attempts have been made throughout history to ban football games, particularly the most rowdy and disruptive forms.

Middle Period: from the early 1920s until the early 1930s. Calcio is still played, mostly as a tourist attraction. Early Period: approximately 1900 to 1914. The game was not played between January 1739 and May 1930, when it was revived to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the match mentioned above. Biomorphic Abstraction (Paris 1934–1944). This is sometimes credited as the earliest known published rules of any football game. Point and Line to Plane (The Bauhaus 1922–1933). In 1580, Count Giovanni de' Bardi di Vernio wrote Discorso sopra 'l giuoco del Calcio Fiorentino.

Russian Intermezzo (1914–1921). While the troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor were besieging Florence, a game of calcio was organised as a show of defiance. Breakthrough to the Abstract (The Blue Rider 1911–1914). The most famous match took place on February 17, 1530. Metamorphosis (Munich 1896–1911). The game is said to have originated as a military training exercise. Beginnings (Moscow 1866–1896). Blows below the belt were allowed.

For example, calcio players could punch, shoulder charge, and kick opponents. The young aristocrats of the city would dress up in fine silk costumes and embroil themselves in a violent form of football. In the 16th century, the city of Florence celebrated the period between Epiphany and Lent by playing a game known as "o Calcio storico" ("kickball in costume") in the Piazza della Novere or the Piazza Santa Croce. (The earliest recorded football match in Ireland was one between Louth and Meath, at Slane, in 1712.).

The first reference to football in Ireland occurs in the Statute of Galway of 1527, which allowed the playing of football and archery but banned "hokie' — the hurling of a little ball with sticks or staves" as well as other sports. However, the first clear reference to a ball being used did not occur until 1486.[3]. In 1424, King James I of Scotland also attempted to ban the playing of "fute-ball". The first clear reference to football was not recorded until 1409, when King Henry IV of England issued an edict to ban it.

This reinforces the idea that the games played at the time did not necessarily involve a ball being kicked. Most of the early references to the game speak simply of "ball play" or "playing at ball". He described the activities of London youths during the annual festival of Shrove Tuesday. 1174-1183).

The first description of football in England was given by William FitzStephen (c. Shrovetide games survive in a number of English towns (see below). A legend that these games in England evolved from a more ancient and bloody ritual of kicking the "Dane's head" is unlikely to be true. These archaic forms of football would be played between neighbouring towns and villages, involving an unlimited number of players on opposing teams, who would clash in a heaving mass of people struggling to drag an inflated pig's bladder by any means possible to markers at each end of a town.

Reports of a game played in Brittany, Normandy and Picardy, known as Choule or Soule, suggest that some of these football games could have arrived in England as a result of the Norman Conquest. The game played in England at this time may have arrived with the Roman occupation, but there is little evidence to indicate this. The Middle Ages saw a huge rise in popularity of annual Shrovetide football matches throughout Europe, particularly in England. However, the route towards the development of modern football games appears to lie in Western Europe and particularly England.

These games and others may well stretch far back into antiquity and have influenced football over the centuries. The ancient Aztec game of ollamalitzli also involved kicking a ball, but it generally had more similarities to basketball. Each match began with two teams facing each other in parallel lines, before attempting to kick the ball through each other team's line and then at a goal. In northern Canada and/or Alaska, the Inuit (Eskimos) played a game on ice called Aqsaqtuk.

An 1878 book by Robert Brough-Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, quotes a man called Richard Thomas as saying, in about 1841, that he had witnessed Aboriginal people playing the game: "Mr Thomas describes how the foremost player will drop kick a ball made from the skin of a possum and how other players leap into the air in order to catch it." It is widely believed that Marn Grook had an influence on the development of Australian Rules Football (see below). In Victoria, Australia, Indigenous Australians played a game called Marn Grook. For example, William Strachey of the Jamestown settlement is the first to record a game played by the Native Americans called Pahsaheman, in 1610. There are a number of less well-documented references to prehistoric, ancient or traditional ball games, played by indigenous peoples all around the world.

The game appears to have vaguely resembled rugby. The Roman game of Harpastu is believed to have been adapted from a team game known as "επισκυρος" (episkyros) or pheninda that is mentioned by Greek playwright, Antiphanes (388-311BC) and later referred to by Clement of Alexandria. The Roman writer Cicero describes the case of a man who was killed whilst having a shave when a ball was kicked into a barbers shop. The Greeks and Romans are known to have played many ball games some of which involved the use of the feet.

In 1903 in a bid to restore ancient traditions the game was revived and it can now be seen played for the benefit of tourists at a number of festivals. The game survived through many years but appears to have died out sometime before the mid 19th century. In kemari several individuals stand in a circle and kick a ball to each other, trying not to let the ball drop to the ground (much like keepie uppie). This is known to have been played within the Japanese imperial court in Kyoto from about 600AD.

Another Asian ball-kicking game, which may have been influenced by tsu chu, is kemari. It was not a game as such but more of a spectacle for the amusement of the Emperor and it may have been performed as long as 3000 years ago. It describes a practice known as tsu chu (Traditional Chinese:蹴鞠 or 蹴踘 ; Pinyin: cù jū) which involved kicking a leather ball through a hole in a piece of silk cloth strung between two 30 foot poles. Documented evidence of what is possibly the oldest organized activity resembling football can be found in a Chinese military manual written during the Han Dynasty in about 2nd century BC.

Football-like games predate recorded history in all parts of the world, though the earliest forms of football are not known. Throughout the history of mankind the urge to kick at stones and other such objects is thought to have led to many early activities involving kicking and/or running with a ball. .
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In all football games, the winning team is the one that has the most points or goals when a specified length of time has elapsed. The object of all football games is to advance the ball by kicking, running with, or passing and catching, either to the opponent's end of the field where points or goals can be scored by, depending on the game, putting the ball across the goal line between posts and under a crossbar, putting the ball between upright posts (and possibly over a crossbar), or advancing the ball across the opponent's goal line while maintaining possession of the ball. Many of the modern games have their origins in England, but many peoples around the world have played games which involved kicking and/or carrying a ball since ancient times. All football games involve scoring points with a spherical or ellipsoidal ball (itself called a football), by moving the ball into, onto, or over a goal area or line defended by the opposing team.

(See football (word) for more details.). In some cases, the word football has been applied to games which have specifically outlawed kicking the ball. While there is no conclusive evidence for this explanation, the word football has always implied a variety of games played on foot, not just those that involved kicking a ball. While it is widely believed that the word football, or "foot ball", originated in reference to the action of a foot kicking a ball, there is a rival explanation, which has it that football originally referred to a variety of games in medieval Europe, which were played on foot.[1] These games were usually played by peasants, as opposed to the horse-riding sports often played by aristocrats.

(See also: Players who have converted from one football code to another.). The English language word football is also applied to Rugby football (Rugby union and Rugby league), American football, Australian rules football, Gaelic football, and Canadian football. The most popular of these worldwide is Association football, which is called soccer in several countries. Football is the name given to a number of different, but related, team sports.

Williams, Graham (1994); The Code War; Yore Publications, ISBN 1874427658. Green, Geoffrey (1953); The History of the Football Association; Naldrett Press, London. Mandelbaum, Michael (2004); The Meaning of Sports; Public Affairs, ISBN 1586482521. Madden NFL.

Fantasy football (American). Blood Bowl. Based on American Football: