Kandinsky’s Abstract Orientalism

Colonial Contexts and Early Abstraction

This book examines for the first time Wassily Kandinsky’s turn to “the Orient” in his early abstraction. Reframing him within colonial history, it reveals how his artistic innovations were shaped by Orientalist tropes, transforming our understanding of this modernist artist and his work from 1909-1913.

This book examines, for the first time, Wassily Kandinsky’s turn to "the Orient" in his early abstraction. Reframing him within colonial history, it reveals how his artistic innovations were shaped by Orientalist tropes, transforming our understanding of this modernist artist and his work from 1909 to 1913.

For over a century, scholars and curators have celebrated Kandinsky as a pioneer of abstraction, focusing on his spiritual and formal innovations while overlooking a crucial dimension of his work: his sustained engagement with Orientalist themes and motifs in the critical years between 1909 and 1913. By identifying, for the first time, a coherent body of "abstract-Orientalist" paintings, this study reframes Kandinsky not as he is commonly presented, as a solitary, heroic artist detached from history, but as one fully entangled in the colonial ideologies of his time. This book demonstrates how even the most canonised figures of modernism cannot be understood separately from the colonial histories in which they worked. The author draws on postcolonial theory, visual analysis, and archival research to demonstrate how Kandinsky’s celebrated innovations were built upon familiar Orientalist tropes that carried associations of racial hierarchy and colonial otherness. These include not only the visual stereotypes of Arab horsemen, veiled figures, and crumbling citadels but also the idea that it was a place of timeless and unchanging spiritual tranquillity. This framing does not diminish Kandinsky’s artistry; rather, it reveals new complexities. These works emerge not only as radical experiments in abstraction but also as artefacts of a society negotiating imperial expansion and cultural encounter.

This is an essential text for researchers in European modernist art, abstract art, and cultural history.

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