Annabel Howard Knihy

Mercurial, saturnine, scandalous, and unpredictable, Caravaggio—as a man, as a character, and as an artist—holds dramatic appeal. He spent a large part of his life on the run, leaving a trail of illuminated chaos wherever he passed, most of it recorded in criminal justice records. When he did settle for long enough to paint, he produced works of staggering creativity and technical innovation. He was famous throughout Italy for his fulminating temper, but also for his radical and sensitive humanization of biblical stories, and in particular his decision to include the brutal and dirty life of the street in his paintings. Caravaggio was a rebel and a violent man, but he eyed the world with deep empathy, realism, and an unrelenting honesty.

Intellectual, emotional, restless, dogged, loyal, selfish; Kandinsky was an artist – and a man – of contradictions. This genre-defying painter didn't pick up a brush until he was thirty years old. He was an academic with a promising career that he threw away to explore the arts. He was a Russian, yet he spent more than half of his life on the road, and died in self-imposed exile in France. As an artist he is credited with history's first abstract painting, but it was his theories that had a profound and lasting impact on the way that people understand and value what art can achieve. Richly illustrated with specially commissioned artworks and 20 of Kandinsky's major works, This is Kandinsky forms the perfect introduction to the life of this revolutionary figure in twentieth-century art. This title is appropriate for ages 14 and up

Die Begegnung mit Claude Monets Bild »Heuhaufen« wurde 1896 zum Wendepunkt in Wassily Kandinskys Leben. Vom kunstinteressierten Juristen entwickelte er sich in den folgenden Jahren zu einem der wichtigsten abstrakten Maler des 20. Jahrhunderts. Er war Teil berühmter Künstlergemeinschaften wie dem »Blauen Reiter«, pflegte Freundschaften zu bekannten Kollegen wie Franz Marc und Paul Klee und war als Dozent am Bauhaus in Weimar und Dessau tätig. Zudem unterhielt er mehrere Jahre lang eine emotional schwierige aber künstlerisch fruchtbare Liebesbeziehung zu der deutschen Malerin Gabriele Münter, bevor er 1917 mit der dreißig Jahre jüngeren Russin Nina Andrejewskaja sein privates Glück fand. Vor den Nationalsozialisten, für die seine Werke »Entartete Kunst« waren, floh er 1933 nach Frankreich. Bis zu seinem Lebensende im Pariser Exil malend, erschuf Kandinsky einige der größten Meisterwerke der Modernen Kunst. Annabell Howard hat das bewegte und unstete Leben des berühmten Malers anschaulich nacherzählt und stellt dabei sowohl den Künstler als auch den Privatmann Wassily Kandinsky in allen Werk- und Lebensphasen vor. Neben einer Auswahl von großen Werken des Malers, finden sich in diesem Buch liebevolle und zu Leben und Werk passende Illustrationen von Adam Simpson.