Wassily Kandinsky

The Sketchbooks

Larry Warsh, Dieter Buchhart, Wassily Kandinsky

$69.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Princeton University Press
01 June 2025

Art & design styles: Modernist design & Bauhaus; Art & design styles: Abstract Expressionism; Individual artists, art monographs

Series: The Sketchbooks

A revelatory collection of the artist's sketches and preparatory drawings, featuring many that have never been published before

The great Russian modernist painter and theorist Wassily Kandinsky was one of the pioneers of abstraction in Western art. Few documents provide more insight into his evolution from figural to abstract art

or into the development of abstraction in the early twentieth century

than the pages of his sketchbooks. Featuring previously unpublished drawings, Wassily Kandinsky: The Sketchbooks is a comprehensive selection of hundreds of sketches from twelve notebooks Kandinsky kept between 1889 and 1935. Beginning with early figure studies, architectural sketches, and landscapes, the notebooks reveal a process of exploration that would lead Kandinsky from his first experiments in geometric abstraction to paintings that reshaped modernism.

Demonstrating Kandinsky's mastery of colour, line, shape, composition, and movement, the book includes notes and preparatory studies for major paintings, such as the 'analytical drawing' for Composition VII (1913), the first study for Several Circles (1926), and Study for Composition IX, a preliminary working of his 1936 masterpiece. Visually stunning, the book offers a remarkable, intimate look at how Kandinsky sought to discover nothing less than a spiritually transcendent form of art.

By: Wassily Kandinsky
Edited by: Larry Warsh, Dieter Buchhart
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 254mm, Width: 203mm,
ISBN: 9780691268507
ISBN 10: 0691268509
Series: The Sketchbooks
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 01 June 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist and one of the pioneers of pure abstraction in early twentieth-century art. Larry Warsh has been active in the art world for more than thirty years as a publisher and artist-collaborator, and was a founding member of the Basquiat Authentication Committee. He is the editor of the ISMs series, including Holzer-isms and Abramovi-isms, as well as Basquiat's The Notebooks and James Rosenquist: Collages, Drawings, and Paintings in Process (all Princeton), among many other books. Dieter Buchhart is a curator and art critic who has organised exhibitions at museums around the world, including the Guggenheim Bilbao, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris. He writes frequently for Kunstforum International.