This is Kandinsky

Description

Intellectual, emotional, restless, dogged, loyal, selfish; Kandinsky was an artist – and a man – of contradictions. This genre-defying painter didn’t pick up a brush until he was thirty years old. He was an academic with a promising career that he threw away to explore the arts.

He was a Russian, yet he spent more than half of his life on the road and died in self-imposed exile in France. As an artist, he is credited with history’s first abstract painting, but it was his theories that had a profound and lasting impact on the way that people understand and value what art can achieve.

Richly illustrated with specially commissioned artworks and 20 of Kandinsky’s major works, This is Kandinsky forms the perfect introduction to the life of this revolutionary figure in twentieth-century art.

Extract from the book:

Russia was crucial to Kandinsky’s identity and to his art. Despite an almost life-long exile – initially self-imposed, then later enforced by the authorities – Kandinsky clung to his Russian heritage. He regarded Russia and particularly Moscow with a mixture of nostalgia, longing, and fabulist romance. He described the evening sun that dipped over Moscow and dissolved the entire city into a single red spot that, “like a wild tuba, set all one’s soul vibrating”. He also wrote that: “to paint this hour, I thought, must be for an artist the most impossible, the greatest joy.”

“Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” BrainyQuote