Kandinsky

By Kenneth C. Lindsay, Wassily Kandinsky, Kenneth C. Lindsay

Book Overview

"The importance of Kandinsky's art and thought in the history of modern art combined with the completeness, careful scholarship, and crisp design of this volume make it especially useful."--Choice

Of all the giants of twentieth-century art, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was the most prolific writer. Here, available for the first time in paperback, are all of Kandinsky's writings on art, newly translated into English. Editors Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo have taken their translations directly from Kandinsky's original texts, and have included select interviews, lecture notes, and newly discovered items along with his more formal writings. The pieces range from one-page essays to the book-length treatises On the Spiritual in Art (1911) and Point and Line to Plane (1926), and are arranged in chronological order from 1901 to 1943. The poetry, good enough to stand on its literary merits, is presented with all the original accompanying illustrations. And the book's design follows Kandinsky's intentions, preserving the spirit of the original typography and layout.
Kandinsky was nearly thirty before he bravely gave up an academic career in law for his true passion, painting. Though his art was marked by extraordinarily varied styles, Kandinsky sought a pure art throughout, one which would express the soul, or "inner necessity," of the artist. His uncompromising search for an art which would elicit a response to itself rather than to the object depicted resulted in the birth of nonobjective art-and in these writings, Kandinsky offered the first cogent explanation of his aims. His language was characterized by its desire for vivification, of the infusion of life into mundane things.
Considered as a whole, Kandinsky's writings exceed all expectations of what an artist should accomplish with words. Not only do his ideas and observations make us rethink the nature of art and the way it reflects the aspirations of his era, but they touch on matters vital to the situation of the human soul.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0306805707
• ISBN13: 9780306805707
• Release Date: March 1994
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Length: 972 Pages
• Weight: 2.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art

A densely translated book. A must have reference for any artist's library.

An essential rendering of the artistic machinery.

This book deserves a commanding coign of vantage on the shelf of any reader desiring a deeper understanding of the creative process. In extending its reach beyond the requisite inclusion of Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art and Point and Line to Plane, the work embraces nearly 900 pages of life-giving insight by the master and driving force of nonobjective art. To cast a light on any one Kandinsky commentary is to risk a plunge of the whole into shadow. We nevertheless salute in general the author's reflections on his fellow artists, for as Kandinsky finds characteristics to praise he provides a refreshing view of art's operating mechanisms. To select but a single example, in a charming commentary on the paintings of musician Arnold Schoenberg the author skewers the popular idea that an artist achieves full realization through a discovery of a "corresponding form" recognizable to all comers. In fact, it is the very discovery of what Kandinsky calls a "dying form" which is to the artist "fatal." As for the converse, the artist who produces an ever-changing series of works representing in their form the development of a more sensitive and robust inner soul discovers, ironically, his works condemned for a lack of stylistic conformance. And so, says Kandinsky, "the dead passes for the living, and vice versa." Schoenberg, the author assures us, is one of the living for in each of his disparate works "the inner desire of the artist speaks forth in a form appropriate to it." If Kandinsky's control of the linguistic levers fails to rise to a degree of calibration one imagines appropriate to the vital topic, and if the author very often satisfies himself with the bold proposition which arrests the reader and inspires a healthy suspicion as to a deliberate reduction of the author's encircling vision, his conclusions are fired by a robust soul attuned to the finest strands of the real, and it only remains to add that in terms of abstraction this work must to the archway of understanding provide a requisite keystone.

Modern Art: A Wealth of Primary Sources

This book is as thorough of a collection of writings by an individual as you will ever find. Including every major treatise, essay, and book by Kandisky, it goes a few steps further with every Kandisky poem (English and German translations) and play. Moreover, the book includes innumerable pamphlets and the like from the earlier late-Expressionist exhibits; also incorporated are several corrspondances between Kandinsky and contemporaries, particularly atonal composer Arnold Schoenburg--illuminating how each other's theories were mutually related and held a reciprocal influence. A little known fact, Schoenburg himself was a non-objective painter--photos of his works are among these pages, as well! Before each section is a contextual introduction to that particular writing. And much much more.

Indispensable

An obligatory text for any visual, aural, or literary artist, and a necessity for any true understanding of the nature of artistic creation.