Wassily Kandinsky: 198 Master Drawings
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Drawing
Wassily Kandinsky: 198 Master Drawings Details
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was painter, printmaker, watercolorist, pioneering theorist of abstraction. Abandoning an academic law career in Russia, he moved to Munich in 1896 at age of thirty to study art. In Munich Kandinsky founded several modern art groups, most notably the Blaue Reiter, in 1911, with Franz Marc. At that time he developed artistic philosophy based on the psychology of colors and shapes and rejected objective representation and materialism in his art and theoretical writings, favoring spiritual approach of "inner necessity," which culminated in his breakthrough to abstraction, around 1913. Nearly two-thirds of his two hundred prints were made between 1900 and 1911, including more than fifty Jugendstil and fairy tale–inspired woodcuts from 1902 to 1904, and another fifty-six increasingly abstract woodcuts between 1907 and 1911 for his book Klänge (Sounds) (1913). These formal experiments with reductive woodcuts served as an important avenue toward abstraction. From 1913 to 1916 Wassily Kandinsky turned to drypoint, completing twelve rich examples. As a Russian citizen, he was expelled from Germany at outbreak of World War I. In post-revolutionary Russia Kandinsky was closely involved with Constructivist circles reorganizing artistic culture, and his own painting became increasingly geometric in style. He returned to Germany in 1921 and was taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 until shuttered by Nazis in 1933. Kandinsky reengaged with various printmaking techniques during Bauhaus years, but left Germany in 1933 and spent remaining years in France.
Reviews
The book arrived in good condition and timely. HOWEVER, how this book was ever published is a mystery to me. I was expecting a compilation of Kandinsky's works in color, since that's what he's known for. Instead, I received a book that looks like someone copied pages on a black and white printer. I should have researched the book more. I usually do, but in this case, my researched lapsed, and I bought a book that is good for campfires.
