Women in a forest

Details

Roethel 60. Provenance: collection of Hans Konrad Roethel, 1956-1971 Direktor der Städtischen Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, acquired directly from the artist; collection of Mr. und Mrs. Robert S. Benjamin, New York; Jean K. Benjamin, USA; private ownership, USA; private collection, Munich.

Description

“Characteristic of Kandinsky’s early woodcuts is the experimentation with the material, i.e. with woodblock and paint. (…) the focus is on the investigation of specific design principles of the flat and the linear. (…) Reproducibility as a characteristic of printmaking enabled Kandinsky to explore different colour variations and thus possible forms of expression. (…) Wassily Kandinsky’s printed oeuvre contains – without taking into account the different print states – 203 wood and linocuts, etchings and lithographs from the years 1902 to 1942 (…). Kandinsky created the majority of his prints during his years in Munich and Paris up to the time of the “Blaue Reiter” group in 1912. He printed his early woodcuts by hand, a process which offers more possibilities than machine printing because the woodblocks can be pressed onto the paper with more or less pressure.” (Melanie Vietmeier, Wassily Kandinskys Holzschnitte. Materialität – Medium – Experiment, Paderborn 2020, p. 4ff.).