Vasily Kandinsky: From Blaue Reiter to the Bauhaus, 1910-1925 - Hardcover

Vasily Kandinsky's work has been celebrated lately by a number of major exhibitions. Contributors to this exhibition catalogue must meet the challenge of offering essays with new scholarly approaches to a well-researched artist. Independent art historian Lloyd and her group of renowned Kandinsky scholars find additional avenues to pursue, and present them in lively, accessible essays. They tease out, in six essays, the big idea inflecting Kandinsky's work of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. They do so with much more success than did the 2013-14 Neue Galerie exhibition itself. As with that exhibition and the color plates of the catalogue, inclusions by Kandinsky's colleagues in the Blaue Reiter group--such as Marc, Macke, Werefkin, and even Klee--do little to illuminate that aspect of the Russian's work. Rather the additional photographs and figures accompanying the essays contribute significantly to understanding how much Kandinsky looked to and incorporated the other arts. Shulamith Behr's, Kandinsky and Theater, especially conveys the extent of Kandinsky's theatrical adventures and their contexts with detailed explications and readings. The documentary value of Christian Derouet's discussion in his chapter titled "The Juryfreie Murals" should be applauded as well. The volume is full of beautiful color plates and archival photographs rarely reproduced. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general readers. (J. Simon CHOICE)