Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was one of the twentieth century's first abstract painters. From his attempt to embody das Geistige (the non-material) in as pure and intense a form as possible, between about 1908 and 1914 his work developed from a traditional representational form to a purely abstract or "concrete" art. / Like many contemporary artists with a strong sense of the synaesthetic resonances among the arts, in the same period Kandinsky was also interested in the relationships between visual art and other media. His explorations included not only several theater pieces but also poetry. It can be no accident that the period of Kandinsky's most intensive activity in non-visual media came at the same time as the most radical change in his visual art. / In 1912 Kandinsky published a synthetic volume of woodcuts and his own prose poems which he called Klange (Sounds or Resonances). Kandinsky said that traces of his development from figurative to abstract art could be seen in both poems and woodcuts. Clearly, Kandinsky was learning something from this other medium which he was able to apply to his visual work. / That is the subject of this study: what Kandinsky was doing in these unusual poems; what he could accomplish more easily in them than he could in his painting; how they contributed to his development toward abstraction; and what the other relationships are between Kandinsky's poetry and his visual art. Kandinsky's letters, theoretical writings, and comparisons among his works constitute the primary sources on which the study draws. / In addition, the study places Kandinsky's poetry and his related theories into historical context, laying out the connections with Symbolist poetry, German Expressionist poetry, Russian Futurism, and Dada in Zurich. / Kandinsky's non-visual works have too long been ignored in the scholarly literature; fewer than a handful of articles on Kandinsky's poetry have been published. This study tries to fill an important gap in our understanding of Kandinsky's work. The poems are not only interesting in themselves but also cast significant light on Kandinsky's working method in this critical period of his development. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-06, Section: A, page: 2336. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74526 |
Contributors | BAMBERG, JULIANN LEILA., Florida State University |
Source Sets | Florida State University |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Text |
Format | 463 p. |
Rights | On campus use only. |
Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
Page generated in 0.0009 seconds