Wassily Kandinsky Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Stephen Spender

Critical Essay by Stephen Spender

SOURCE: "The Glow of Irreality," in New York Review of Books, Vol. XXVIII, No. 13, August 13, 1981, pp. 40-43.

In the following favorable review of Sounds, Spender considers the relationship between Kandinsky's poetry and his painting.

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...
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