.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Created at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1923, one year after the publication of the portfolio Kleine Welten (see lot 242), the colour lithograph Orange is Kandinsky's largest print.
In his tract Punkt und Linie zu Fläche ('Point and line to plane'), published in the series Bauhausbücher in 1926, Kandinsky reflected on the characteristics of the various printmaking techniques and attributed different social values to them. Lithography he saw as the most democratic technique, as it allows the production of an unlimited number of identical impressions, and as the most painterly of all methods, supremely suited for colour printing. In this sense it was also the printing technique that represented the ideals of the Bauhaus most perfectly: the creation of beautiful and rational objects of art and design that could be mechanically produced and thus made available to the masses. The goal was an aesthetic as well as practical reformation of everybody's everyday life.
A large print like Orange, approaching the size of a small canvas, could thus serve as an affordable substitute for a painting. This meant that living with art no longer needed to be the privilege of those who could afford paintings.
Although it would have been possible to print an unlimited number of impressions, in the event Orange was printed in a relatively small, 'aristocratic' edition of sixty (see Weber, p. 89). Perhaps the calculation was that a larger edition would have been difficult to distribute and that the demand for such an avant-garde image would have been rather limited in any case.
Stylistically, Orange represents a next step in Kandinsky's development following on from Kleine Welten, less playful and chaotic, yet with greater clarity and serenity and an unsurpassed subtlety of colouration. It was to be Kandinsky's last – and arguably finest – colour lithograph.
In his tract Punkt und Linie zu Fläche ('Point and line to plane'), published in the series Bauhausbücher in 1926, Kandinsky reflected on the characteristics of the various printmaking techniques and attributed different social values to them. Lithography he saw as the most democratic technique, as it allows the production of an unlimited number of identical impressions, and as the most painterly of all methods, supremely suited for colour printing. In this sense it was also the printing technique that represented the ideals of the Bauhaus most perfectly: the creation of beautiful and rational objects of art and design that could be mechanically produced and thus made available to the masses. The goal was an aesthetic as well as practical reformation of everybody's everyday life.
A large print like Orange, approaching the size of a small canvas, could thus serve as an affordable substitute for a painting. This meant that living with art no longer needed to be the privilege of those who could afford paintings.
Although it would have been possible to print an unlimited number of impressions, in the event Orange was printed in a relatively small, 'aristocratic' edition of sixty (see Weber, p. 89). Perhaps the calculation was that a larger edition would have been difficult to distribute and that the demand for such an avant-garde image would have been rather limited in any case.
Stylistically, Orange represents a next step in Kandinsky's development following on from Kleine Welten, less playful and chaotic, yet with greater clarity and serenity and an unsurpassed subtlety of colouration. It was to be Kandinsky's last – and arguably finest – colour lithograph.