Vasily Kandinsky From Blaue Reiter to the Bauhaus, 1910-1925 /anglais - Tapa dura

Vasily Kandinsky's work has been celebrated lately by a number of major exhibitions. Contributors to this exhibition catalogue must meet the challenge of offering essays with new scholarly approaches to a well-researched artist. Independent art historian Lloyd and her group of renowned Kandinsky scholars find additional avenues to pursue, and present them in lively, accessible essays. They tease out, in six essays, the big idea inflecting Kandinsky's work of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. They do so with much more success than did the 2013-14 Neue Galerie exhibition itself. As with that exhibition and the color plates of the catalogue, inclusions by Kandinsky's colleagues in the Blaue Reiter group--such as Marc, Macke, Werefkin, and even Klee--do little to illuminate that aspect of the Russian's work. Rather the additional photographs and figures accompanying the essays contribute significantly to understanding how much Kandinsky looked to and incorporated the other arts. Shulamith Behr's, Kandinsky and Theater, especially conveys the extent of Kandinsky's theatrical adventures and their contexts with detailed explications and readings. The documentary value of Christian Derouet's discussion in his chapter titled "The Juryfreie Murals" should be applauded as well. The volume is full of beautiful color plates and archival photographs rarely reproduced. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general readers.--J. Simon "CHOICE "

This catalogue accompanies a major exhibition devoted to Vasily Kandinsky. It explores the evolution of his work from the Blaue Reiter to the Bauhaus years. During this period, Kandinsky developed his revolutionary abstract style and began to move beyond conventional easel painting. As master of the mural workshop at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky was able to put his ambition to create large-scale art environments into practice, particularly in his mural designs for the 1922 Juryfreie exhibition in Berlin and later in his decorations for the Salon de Musique in 1931. At this time, he developed a strong interest in the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. Embracing the principles of synesthesia, Kandinsky focused on the relationship between art and music, pushing the boundaries of the medium.Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) began painting at the age of 30, after putting aside a highly successful career in law. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, he returned to his native Moscow just after the outbreak of World War I. Uninspired by the prevalent Suprematist and Futurist art there, he returned to Germany in 1921, teaching at the Bauhaus until the school was closed by the Nazis. He then moved to France, where he lived until his death in 1944.