Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) had a profound impact on European Modernism both with respect to art and to art theory. As founder of Der Blaue Reiter—a group including such Expressionist artists as Franz Marc and Gabriele Münter—Kandinsky was responsible for most of the writing in the group’s publication, The Blue Rider Almanac. Chief among these treatises was Concerning the Spiritual in Art, originally published in 1910. Kandinsky defended abstraction in visual art and made the case that all art forms could achieve a level of spirituality. Furthermore, he argued for the importance of color as both a compositional and psychological tool in painting. The ultimate goal for the artist, however, was to find “the principle of innermost necessity” that resulted in spiritual elevation, the “vibration of the human soul.” A seminal treatise on Modernism from one of its key proponents, Concerning the Spiritual in Art is a must-have for any student or admirer of 20th-century art history.

One of the foremost artistic innovators of abstraction in the 20th century, Vasily Kandinsky sought to liberate painting from its ties to the natural world and promote the spiritual in art. This richly illustrated publication looks at Kandinsky anew, through a critical lens, reframing our understanding of this vital figure of European modernism, who was also a prolific aesthetic theorist and writer.
A series of thematic essays considers his engagement with avant-garde artistic communities including the Bauhaus, his relationship to improvisation and music, his travels in Europe and Russia, and the influences behind his self-declared anarchist mode of abstraction, among other topics. Tracing Kandinsky’s life and work through his years in Moscow, several cities in Germany, and Paris, the texts offer striking new insights into an artist whose creative production and style were intimately tied to a sense of place—and displacement—and evolved amid the political and social upheavals catalyzed by the Russian Revolution and World Wars I and II.
Kandinsky’s history is closely linked to that of the Guggenheim Museum. Solomon R. Guggenheim began collecting the artist’s work in 1929; a year later, they met at the Bauhaus, in Dessau. This book features more than half of the museum’s deep holdings of works by Kandinsky, presenting the full arc of his artistic development and career. Included are paintings in oil and oil with sand, reverse-glass paintings, as well as woodcuts, watercolors and drawings on paper. An illustrated chronicle of Kandinsky’s life and career, including selected exhibitions and publications, rounds out the volume.

In 1911, Russian painter and theorist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) published his seminal treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art; over a decade later, in 1926, he debuted the text’s de facto sequel, Point and Line to Plane. In the latter volume, Kandinsky further develops the ideas that would come to inform not only the Bauhaus School but many other artistic movements: he theorizes that different constellations of point, line and surface have different emotional effects on the viewer. With the singular point as the most minimal graphic form, Kandinsky understands all painterly efforts as an extrapolation of forces and counterforces. This focus on contrasts and the effects of form can easily be seen as contemporary today.
As part of the publisher’s ongoing Bauhausbücher series, Lars Müller has released a facsimile edition of Kandinsky’s text translated into English with the original design and typography.