Volume 28, Number 13 · August 13, 1981
The Glow of Irreality
By Stephen Spender
Sounds
by Wassily Kandinsky, translated by Elizabeth R. Napier
Yale University Press, 136 pp., $11.95 (paper)
"Kandinsky: The Improvisations" 1981
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. April 26-September 7,
The coincidence of the exhibition 'Kandinsky: The Improvisations' at the National Gallery of Art in Washington with the publication of Elizabeth Napier's translation of Kandinsky's book Sounds(Klänge) is happy. Both belong approximately to the second decade of the present century. Kandinsky painted the first Improvisation in 1909. In 1913 Klänge, a volume of thirty-eight prose poems and fifty-six woodcuts, twelve of them in color, was published by Piper Verlag in Munich, in an edition of 345 copies. This edition, which did not sell well at the time, is one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century German book production. Five copies are on display in the present exhibition, though, as is inevitable, they are in a glass case, so that one can see only three poems and five woodcuts.
Review, 3672 words
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