This book studies Vasily Kandinsky's (1866-1944) pre-1908 figurative art that formed the basis for his later abstractions. It analyzes many published and unpublished facts of the artist's life and work and brings together numerous historical comparative data from painting, literature, the social sciences, ethnography, folklore, esthetics, and philosophy. This study penetrates deeply into Kandinsky's inner world and breaks new ground by interpreting the artist's enigmatic early imagery as his personal many-layered symbolism that expresses his complex personality, his internal responses to Russian and Western European life and culture, and his quest for spiritual truths.

Kandinsky's theory of art has usually been treated as little more than a guide to help our understanding of his paintings. In contrast, this book attends primarily to the artist's writings on art; thus his art theory is treated on its own terms. Drawing on the diverse literature that has been written on Kandinsky's art and theory, the author demonstrates that while many different perspectives on his work have been identified, none holds the 'key' to that work. Instead, the book shows Kandinsky's method in his writings to be highly eclectic, resulting in an exciting and challenging variety of content (a description that also applies, as a postscript to the book shows, to his method in painting). Kandinsky, however, transcended this diversity and consistently sought evidence of the unity of all things: something that would be realised through his understanding of the term 'synthesis'. The book follows Kandinsky's fascinating attempts to establish synthesis (not only in art but also in other disciplines including science, mathematics, law and politics) in his key theoretical publications: On the Spiritual in Art (1911) and Point and Line to Plane (1926). The result is a new and innovative understanding of both Kandinsky's art theory and his art.

Vasilii Kandinsky, whom many consider to be the father of abstract painting, was also a trained ethnographer with an abiding interest in the folklore of Old Russia. In this provocative book, Peg Weiss provides an entirely new interpretation of Kandinsky's art by examining for the first time how this commitment to his ethnic Russian heritage influenced the painter's work throughout his career.

Pioneering work by the great modernist painter, considered by many to be the father of abstract art and a leader in the movement to free art from traditional bonds. 12 illustrations.

In one of his sparkling aphorisms on the end of 'optical' art, Marcel Duchamp suggested that the title of an artwork was an 'invisible color'. John Welchman now offers the first critical history of how and why modern artworks receive their titles. He shows that titles were seldom produced and can rarely be understood outside of the institutional parameters that made them visible - exhibitions, criticism, catalogues, and even national politics.

Beautifully illustrated, this insightful book looks at two influential artist couples and the roles of gender and the applied arts in the emergence of abstraction.

Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book 2: The Anti-capitalist Sublime takes up where Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book 1: Radical Scholarship (2015) left off, foremost in terms of a critique of neo-liberal academia and its demotion of the book in favor of various mediatic practices that substitute, arguably, for the one form of critical inquiry that might safeguard speculative intellectual inquiry as long-form and long-term project, especially in relationship to the archive or library (otherwise known as the "public domain"). This ongoing critique of neo-liberal academia is a necessary corrective to processes underway today toward the further marginalization of radical critique, with many of the traditional forms of sustained analysis being replaced by pseudo-empirical studies that abandon themes only presentable in the Arts and Humanities through the "arcanian closure" that the book as long-form inquisition represents (whether as novel, non-fictional critique, or something in-between). As a tomb for thought, this privileging of the shadowy recesses of the book preserves, through the very apparatuses of long- and slow-form scholarship, the premises presented here as indicative of an anti-capitalist project embedded in works that might otherwise shun such a characterization. The perverse capitalist capture of knowledge through mass digitalization is - paradoxically - the negative corollary for the reduction by abstraction of everyday works to a philosophical and moral inquest against Capital. The latter actually constitutes a transversal reduction for works (across works) toward the age-old antithesis to instrumentalized socio-cultural production - Spirit. For similar reasons, the anti-capitalist sublime as presented here is primarily a product of the imaginative, magical-realist regimes of thought in service to "no capital" - to no capitalization of thought. This book seeks to re-establish paradigmatic, a-historical, and universalizing practices in humanistic scholarship associated with speculative inquiry as a form of art, utilizing in passing forms of art and exemplary paradigmatic practices that are also first-order forms of speculative inquiry - suggesting that first-order works in the Arts and Humanities are those works that may "suffer" second-order incorporations without the attendant loss of the impress of sublimity (Spirit).