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Catalogue


Kandinsky: the path to abstraction
Edited by Hartwig Fischer and Sean Rainbird

• A major reassessment of this pioneer of
  twentieth-century abstraction
• Features essays by leading international authors
• Includes seldom-seen works and artist’s writings
• Explores the crucial influence of music and spirituality on Kandinsky’s art

Publication May 2006
290 x 245 mm
224 pp
110 colour and 20 black-and-white illustrations

Hardback
ISBN: 1 85437 677 2
ISBN 13: 978 185437 677 0
£35.00

Paperback
ISBN: 1 85437 624 1
ISBN 13: 978 185437 624 4
£24.99

Wassily Kandinsky pioneered abstract art and is a key figure in the history of Modern painting. His move from figurative painting to abstraction was a gradual one; this book follows that fascinating journey during the first twenty years of his career. Inspired in his early years as a painter by folklore scenes from Russia and the heightened colours of the landscape of southern Germany, he went on to co-found the Expressionist Blaue Reiter(Blue Rider) group of painters with Gabriele Münter, Alexej Jawlensky and Franz Marc. Gradually he stripped away the descriptive detail in his painting, hiding visual imagery behind fields of bright colour encompassed by strong lines. He felt that what he had discovered was a path to a new spiritual reality, more akin to music than the physical world.

This fully illustrated study of Kandinsky’s formative years includes an account of the period Kandinsky spent in revolutionary Russia, examines his relationship with the painter Gabriele Münter and explores the profound influence music had on his art.

Hartwig Fischer is a curator at Kunstmuseum, Basel.
Sean Rainbird is a Tate curator and the author of Beckmann.

Contributors
Shulamith Behr is Senior Lecturer in German Twentieth
Century Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Bruno Haas is Maître de Conférences at the Sorbonne,
Paris.
Noemi Smolik is an art historian and critic.
Reinhard Zimmermann is Professor of History of Art at the University of Trier.