San Antonio College Library

Kandisky's rich, trail-blazing work and complex personality have compelled attention ever since the controversy surrounding his first abstract paintings of 1911, when the press labelled him a "bluffer" and a "madman." In his native Russia, the Communists ostracized him as a "formalist," while the Nazis exhibited his work as "Degenerate Art." Member of the Blaue Reiter and the Bauhaus, close ally of Franz Marc and Paul Klee, Kandinsky influenced virtually...

The seventeen essays in this provocative book provide a radical rethinking of abstraction, from the Symbolism that prefigured abstract art through the current manifestations of spiritual content in American and European painting.