Sounds Kandinsky, Wassily and Napier, Elizabeth R

Wassily Kandisnskys Sounds Klnge, a volume of poems written and illustrated by the Russian artist and pioneer of abstract painting, was originally published in a limited edition in Munich in 1912 Although it was highly regarded by such artists as Hugo Ball and Jean Arp and acclaimed by the Zurich Dadaists, it remains one of the least known of Kandinskys major writings This is the first complete English translation of Kandinskys textSounds is one of the earliest, most beautiful examples of a twentiethcentury livre dartiste and a rare instance of a book in which text and illustrations are the work of a single artist The poems, alternately narrative and expressive in quality, are witty, simple in structure and vocabulary, and often startling in content They repeatedly treat questions of space, color, physical design, and the act of seeing in a world that offers multiple and often contradictory possibilities to the viewer The woodcuts range from early Jugendstilinspired, representational designs to vignettes that are purely abstract in formPublished in the same year as his Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Sounds sheds a different but equally significant light on Kandinskys movement toward abstractiona movement that was to exercise a profound influence on future directions in art In addition to the 38 poems and 56 woodcuts, which are arranged as in the original edition, the volume includes an introduction, the German text of the poems, and the artists chronology ISBN10: 0300026641 ISBN13: 9780300026641Material Type: paperback