Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist As Ethnographer and Shaman

Rating:
Summary: Transform your understanding of Kandinsky
Review: 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".