Customer Reviews

Wassily Kandinsky: 1866-1944 a Revolution in Painting (Basic Art)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book has excellent images on Kandinsky's work beginning with his representational early works to his abstract later works. The color quality of the prints are good and the information is readable - to the point and not overwhelming like many art books can be. I only wish this book was bigger with more examples of his work. ...A good resource for art educators.

This book in few pages can describe Kandinsky so well. The style of Kandisky which reflected the developments and strides physics took in first 2 decades of century is shown in his love of planes and geometry.

Excellent Book! It is very informative and well written.The illustrations are great and give deep insight into the artist's life and work.Ordering from the purveyor through Amazon was a breeze as always!I recommend this title to anyone dabbling in art history or with a real interest in examining his marvelous paintings.

... any museum gallery where I see his paintings. That goes for all his 'periods' and styles; I like them all. With a Kandinsky "Composition" in the room, no other painting has much chance of pinning me to the floor in front of it for any length of gazing. And Kandinsky's work is 'everywhere' - unlike the paintings of Edvard Munch, for instance - in almost every worthy museum of modern art I've visited in the USA and, of course, in Germany. I can't remember ever seeing a Kandinsky painting that I wouldn't buy instantly if I could and hang where I'd see it most.

However, looking at the well-printed plates in this small Taschen volume, I discover that "scale" is more crucial to Kandinsky than to many other painters. These plates are too small to convey Kandinsky's energy. The value of the volume, therefore, is more as a catalogue of his work than as a joy to the senses. That catalogue value could easily have been much greater if the book had included a list, even partial, of the locations of his paintings around the world.

I'm less than delighted this time with the biographical/critical text of the Taschen book than I have been with volumes discussing other painters. The text by Hajo Düchting is drudgery to read, at least in English translation, and seems to me to present Kandinsky as more of a spiritualist-irrationalist than his own writings make him. Kandinsky was a disciplined academic by training, who resolutely departed from a university career in order to 'construct' himself as an artist. Of course he was intuitive, but he was also analytical and intentional in every stage of his career. Van Gogh or Jackson Pollock he was not, psychologically, not a wild man, yet his work is every bit as compelling emotionally as theirs.

The word "visionary" is so often overused, but Wassily Kandinsky truly was one. Pick up this book and find out why!