Customer Reviews

Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman

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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".

"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confessed all when he said he traded the horse for the circle, this book reveals that the "inner necessity" which superseded the outer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!