Kandinsky’s Abstract Orientalism: Colonial Contexts and Early Abstraction (Routledge Research in Art History)

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