Kandinsky : Watercolours and Other Works on Paper Book

Vasily Kandinsky was one of the most pivotal figures in the development of modernist painting. Born in 1866, by the time of his death in Paris in the immediate aftermath of the city's liberation, he had been closely associated with a revolutionary shift in the nature of European painting whose effects are still being felt by painters today. Kandinsky was responsible for some of the most significant developments in high modernism, most significantly his involvement with the Blue Rider group, Russian Constructivism, and the later years of the Bauhaus. By the end of 1910 Kandinsky was developing a purely abstract style in his paintings, in particular through the medium of watercolour, as Frank Whitford argues in his introductory essay to Kandinsky: Watercolours and Other Works on Paper. Designed to accompany the first full-scale exhibition of Kandinsky's work in London at the Royal Academy of Arts, this is a beautiful book containing 168 colour illustrations of Kandinsky's work on paper. It traces his development from an unremarkable painter of Russian folk scenes to the geometrically precise and clinical draughtsmen of the later abstract creations, culminating in the final, strangely micro-organic images of the 1940s. Whitfield's introductory essay charts Kandinsky's career with wonderful lucidity, and is particularly good on the tension between Kandinsky's theory and practice, although less sure of quite how significant the works on paper are more generally, and what sort of legacy Kandinsky has left for future generations; but perhaps the book will provide the possibilities for just such a reassessment of Kandinsky's standing within the history of modern art. --Jerry BrottonRead More