?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 8,000
WASSILY KANDINSKY Rosen.
Woodcut printed in black on cream laid paper, circa 1903. 69x138 mm; 2 3/4x5 1/2 inches, narrow margins. A very good impression of this this extremely scarce, early woodcut.
Property of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, sold to benefit the acquisitions fund.
At the time of this woodcut, Kandinsky (1866-1944) was living and working in Munich. As a prominent member of Der Blaue Reiter, the artistic group centered around Russian émigrés including Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin which foreshadowed German Expressionism. Kandinsky also wrote extensively on art theory and composed the group's manifesto. He is recognized among the first artists to create fully abstract works and, as his career progressed, he further saught to express emotion and spirituality through his abstract art.
Rosen is a very early example of Kandinsky's technical skill as a printmaker. The woodcut is characteristic of Kandinsky's work in the early 1900s, when--influenced by Fauvism--he introduced the use of stylized forms and shapes that would later give way to pure abstraction.
The composition of this woodcut echoes what is perhaps his most important painting from the early 1900s, and the source of the group's moniker, Der Blaue Reiter, 1903, which shows a figure on horseback galloping through a rocky meadow with a similar castle in the distance. Roethel 14.
