Kleine Welten, No IV. Small Worlds, No 4. by Wassily Kandinsky, 1866-1944

Wassily Kandinsky, 1866-1944
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Kleine Welten, No IV. Small Worlds, No 4.

Original lithograph in colours. 1922. Signed in pencil. Also signed in the stone. From the total edition of 230 impressions - 200 on wove paper as here, plus 30 on japan paper. Drawn on the stone by Kandinsky and printed under his supervision for the Bauhaus, Weimar 1922. Issued in the series 'Kleine Welten - Small Worlds' by the Propylaen Verlag, Berlin 1922
Ref: Roethel - Kandinsky Das Graphishe Werk no 165.
Provenance: Kunsthistorisches Museum Rostock (loan from the Burkamp family).

Absolutely exceptional fresh impression with unfaded colours. On pale cream light wove paper. Extremely fine condition. Full untrimmed sheet. Sheet: 13 3/8 x 11 3/8ins. Image overall: 10 1/2 x 10 1/8ins. 267x256mm.

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The series of twelve prints, in lithography, woodcut and etching, that Kandinsky drew in 1922 under the title ?Kleine Welten - Small Worlds? marks a high point in the period of his work at the Bauhaus in Weimar. The Bauhaus school of design, architecture and craft had been founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius. He appointed Marks, Feininger and Itten to form a management council and invited a number of leading artists to be his artistic directors, including Klee and Moholy-Nagy as well as Kandinsky.

It is perhaps more to Kandinsky than to any other artist of his generation that we can attribute the birth of abstract art. In 1911 he and Franz Marc arranged an exhibition in Munich under the title ?Der Blaue Reiter - The Blue Rider?. In the works that he showed in this exhibition of avant-garde painting and also in a series of prints in an album entitled ?Klänge - Sounds? he created compositions in which for the first time the arrangement of the forms and colours did not have the primary purpose of description but rather it was just their association and interaction which created a mental effect in the viewer - in the same way as music evokes mental images in the listener. By the beginning of the 1920?s Kandinsky?s images had become wholly abstract and he had abandoned the freeform shapes of 1911 in favour of geometric shapes. However, he was still placing the same fundamental emphasis on the links between sounds or music and the images of his pictures.

When Kandinsky decided to make the twelve prints which make up the ?Kleine Welten? series he wrote a short introduction to the works. In this he stated that the prints fell into three groups - lithographs, woodcuts and etchings. Each group had been chosen as a result of its individual character and the character of each type of print had helped to form the outward nature of the creation of differing ?Small Worlds?. In six of the prints these ?Small Worlds? were complete with just black lines or marks, but in the six others they needed the ?sound? of other colours. By ?small worlds? Kandinsky was suggesting that as the viewer enters into each abstract composition he becomes enclosed visually and mentally in an isolated individual environment conditioned by the forms and the sound of the colours, a continuing emphasis on the associations between music and visual art. The ?Kleine Welten? prints are one of the most complete and developed statements of this period of Kandinsky?s art.

Kandinsky emphasised that all the prints in the?Kleine Welten? series were his own original work created with his own hands. In all cases he was also actively involved in supervising and controlling the editioning. He was particularly demanding over the printing of the colours in the lithographs of the series. He wanted to use very translucent inks to give the colours the right ?sound?. Unfortunately this resulted in tones which were very sensitive to light and over the years since 1922 many impressions of the colour lithographs have faded. The impression above comes from a group which were kept in portfolio until they were loaned to an East German museum before the War. In the museum they were also kept in portfolios and seldom saw daylight. The owning family recently recovered the prints from the museum and sold them, again without framing. As a result the colours in the impression above are superbly fresh and unfaded.