Wassily Kandinsky's Sketchbooks Offer New Insights Into His Art

Shedding light on how the artist’s ideas and visual language took shape over the years.

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Wassily Kandinsky, best known as the pioneer of abstract painting, kept a trove of sketchbooks between 1889 and 1935. Twelve of these sketchbooks are now the focus of a new release from No More Rulers. Wassily Kandinsky: The Sketchbooks, edited by Larry Warsh and Dieter Buchhart, pulls together select pages that shed light on how the artist’s ideas and visual language took shape over the years.

The book features studies on composition, space and color that echo throughout Kandinsky’s later works. Alongside drawings are handwritten notes, personal reflections and the occasional poem which point to artists and writers who influenced his thinking at the time.

Also included are printed manifestos where Kandinsky outlines his growing views on abstraction, revealing the thought process behind his push to give abstract art a more philosophical grounding.

The book is available now for $39.95 USD through No More Rulers’ website.

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