A revelatory collection of the artist’s sketches and preparatory drawings, featuring many that have never been published before

The great Russian modernist painter and theorist Wassily Kandinsky was one of the pioneers of abstraction in Western art. Few documents provide more insight into his evolution from figural to abstract art—or into the development of abstraction in the early twentieth century—than the pages of his sketchbooks. Featuring previously unpublished drawings, Wassily Kandinsky: The Sketchbooks is a comprehensive selection of hundreds of sketches from twelve notebooks Kandinsky kept between 1889 and 1935. Beginning with early figure studies, architectural sketches, and landscapes, the notebooks reveal a process of exploration that would lead Kandinsky from his first experiments in geometric abstraction to paintings that reshaped modernism.

Demonstrating Kandinsky’s mastery of color, line, shape, composition, and movement, the book includes notes and preparatory studies for major paintings, such as the “analytical drawing” for Composition VII (1913), the first study for Several Circles (1926), and Study for Composition IX, a preliminary working of his 1936 masterpiece. Visually stunning, the book offers a remarkable, intimate look at how Kandinsky sought to discover nothing less than a spiritually transcendent form of art.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist and one of the pioneers of pure abstraction in early twentieth-century art. Larry Warsh has been active in the art world for more than thirty years as a publisher and artist-collaborator, and was a founding member of the Basquiat Authentication Committee. He is the editor of the ISMs series, including Holzer-isms and Abramović-isms, as well as Basquiat’s The Notebooks and James Rosenquist: Collages, Drawings, and Paintings in Process (all Princeton), among many other books. Dieter Buchhart is a curator and art critic who has organized exhibitions at museums around the world, including the Guggenheim Bilbao, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. He writes frequently for Kunstforum International.