Kleine Welten VI (Small Worlds VI)

Wassily Kandinsky is generally regarded as the father of abstraction in art. After giving up a career in law Kandinsky moved to Germany to study painting in Munich. There he founded Der Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc and others as a means to combat what they considered the highly limiting figurative painting of the contemporary art academy. This image from a series of twelve shows Kandinsky creating an atmosphere solely with nonfigurative forms: spheres, curving lines, and rectangles. The print is especially notable for the variance of texture presented, showing both solid blocks of black of next to hatched and marked areas. Through these manipulations of texture and form, Kandinsky creates a self-contained universe, an image completely distinct from our reality, governed by its own rules and figures. (“Imprint/ In Print,” curated by Nancy E. Green with assistance from Christian Waibel ’17 and presented at the Johnson Museum August 8 – December 20, 2015)