Vasilii Kandinsky, whom many consider to be the father of abstract painting, was also a trained ethnographer with an abiding interest in the folklore of Old Russia. In this work, Peg Weiss provides an interpretation of Kandinsky's art by examining how this commitment to his ethnic Russian heritage influenced the painter's work throughout his career. Weiss describes Kandinsky's university training in ethnography, his expedition to Russia's Vologda province in 1889, his involvement as a student with the country's most influential ethnographic group - the Imperial Society of Friends of the Natural Sciences, Anthropology, and Ethnography - and the literature he read while writing reviews for the society's journal, "Ethnographic Review". Weiss shows that Kandinsky's knowledge of Finno-Ugric, Lapp and Siberian shamanism and folklore provided him with an indelible palette of iconographic references that resonated in his work - from his earliest paintings to his last. Identifying specific ethnographic and folkloristic motifs in his iconography, Weiss argues that despite numerous stylistic changes, Kandinsky's paintings consistently reflected an underlying message: his belief in the shamanist calling of the artist to provide a means of cultural healing and regeneration.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Transform your understanding of Kandinsky,
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This review is from: Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman (Hardcover)
This book is remarkable, truly one of my favourite art books of all time. It simply puts Kandinsky's art in an entirely new perspective, and enables one to decipher his abstractions in terms of his evolving interests as a scholar, ethnographer and artist.Not only does it explain his work very well, but also enables the reader to examine much of his early work, which has never been delved into in such detail, with a number reproduced in superb colour. It shows sketches from his student notebooks, and from ethnographic field trips into Siberia; it shows comparisons with art from those regions and other "primitive" ikons that informed his own formal language; and his often overlooked paintings on glass. Weiss's approach fills in the gaps in Will Grohmann's conventional biography and the strictly formalist interpretation in Paul Overy's "The language of the eye".
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A miracle that changes the face of art history,
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This review is from: Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman (Hardcover)
"Kandinsky and Old Russia" changes everything. Even as the artist confessed all when he said he traded the horse for the circle, this book reveals that the "inner necessity" which superseded the outer
one was/is not strictly "intuition". Wassily's ethnographic roots, a reconciliatory place between law and art, took him on a journey via drumbeats/hoofbeats to the other world- not merely the "modern" cul de sac of "pure art", where shapes were only shapes and colors- colors, but where the personal intersected with the universal; the instant met the timeless. Shades of Joesph Campbell! St. George; the yellow triangle; the horse; the red square; ancient lands; the blue circle- mix and converge in a not so simple image. The interface between inner and outer manifests in an icon that, like his double vision of the landscape that was ALSO not a landscape on its side (after Monet's grainstacks), does not bring art to an end to end all, but to a more potential and more vast Beginning. Kandinsky did not simplify this for us! He was not really interested in the "modern"; he was interested in the art of all time amid the timely; the whipcrack of inner and outer; current and ancient worlds in the only viable harmony worth pursuing: dynamic contrast. Yes, and this image is undecipherably, the symbol that stands for everything. That is why his art- especially the last, great geometric paintings- is some of the best things ever made, and remain relevant/contemporary, not "modern". This book must be reprinted!
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