Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky is credited with painting the first purely abstract works. Our Kandinsky Circles portfolio of notecards features two of his most notable paintings, Colour Study: Squares with Concentric Circles (1913) and Several Circles (1926). Both illustrate Kandinsky's use of the circle; a form which he claimed pointed most clearly to the fourth dimension. The 12 notecards in this vibrant portfolio are the ideal size for sending notes and enclosed photos.

Wassily Kandinsky was one of the most influential painters of the twentieth century, and this text, in which he laid out the tenets of painting as he saw them and made the case for nonobjective artistic forms, is universally recognized as an essential document of Modernist art theory. A brilliant philosophical treatise and an emphatic avant-garde tract, it provides the theoretical underpinnings for Kandinsky's own work and that of his associates in the Blaue Reiter movement. While Michael Sadler's masterful translation has been available and authoritative since its original publication in 1914, what hasn't been published until now is the significant correspondence between the translator and the artist, who followed the progress of his book's transformation closely, and who offered numerous insights into and explanations of its meanings. These letters, from the archives of Tate Britain, have here been appended to Kandinsky's text to provide the first comprehensively annotated edition of this seminal work. This volume, which supersedes any previous edition, includes the letters, Kandinsky's prefaces and prose poems relating to the period in which the book was written and Sadler's selected writings on art. It is more than an expanded edition — it is a major event, the first full account of a remarkable literary collaboration.

Alongside his development of a revolutionary abstract style, Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) demonstrated an ambition to go beyond conventional easel painting. His famous large paintings with musical and theatrical associations transformed into veritable environments. The catalogue explores the evolution of a Gesamtkunstwerk in the work of Kandinsky including essays by leading Kandinsky scholars on painting as a total work of art, or the artist’s interest in music and theatre. Separated into three sections, it illustrates how Kandinsky’s fascination for the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the principles of synesthesia developed into large-scale painting within the context of the two highly significant artistic groups Blaue Reiter and Bauhaus, as well as in response to the changing historical circumstances, last but not least, culminating in his large-scale decorative utopian murals and installations.