Kleine Welten X
Wassily Kandinsky
Kleine Welten X
drypoint
1922
An original hand-signed Wassily Kandinsky drypoint print.
1922
Original drypoint printed in black ink on heavy, stiff laid paper.
Hand-signed in pencil in the margin lower right Kandinsky, also signed in the plate with the artist’s monogram lower left.
A superb impression of the definitive state, from the edition of 200 on this paper (there were 30 additional impressions printed on Japan paper, for an overall edition of 230). One of twelve plates (four lithographs, four woodcuts, four drypoints) published in the portfolio Kleine Weltenby Propylean Verlag, Berlin, for the Staatliches Bauhaus, Weimar.
Catalog: Roethel 173
Size Image: 9 3/8 x 7 ¾ inches
Sheet Size: 11 7/8 x 10 ½ inches
Framed Size: 19 5/8 x 17 1/8 x 1 1/4 inches
The graphic images created by Kandinsky during his Bauhaus period of the 1920’s are some of the most important of his career. In this period the language of his pictures is totally non-representational. Derived from his concepts of the abstract creative role of color and shape in the Blaue Reiter period (c. 1911) and influenced by the Constructivist use of geometric form with which he became closely involved when in Russia in 1914 through 1920, the imagery of the 1920’s uses shape to create an image which is strongly three-dimensional in its concept but which communicates on the level of the subliminal mind.
Kandinsky was without doubt the most important and influential figure of the Bauhaus in the 1920’s, not only as a result of his painting and his formative role in the whole concept of abstract art, but also because of his ability to express his ideas in words. In 1926 he issued Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (“Point and Line to Plane”) which became one of the seminal texts of the Bauhaus approach to abstraction. His compositions of this period are amongst the great statements of his art in the graphic medium and key works in all of 20th century graphic artwork.
The prints which Kandinsky made for the series Kleine Welten in 1922 (four lithographs in color, two woodcuts in color, two woodcuts in black & white, and four drypoints in black & white), represent the pinnacle of his graphic artwork manifested during the Bauhaus period.