Books by Megan Fontanella

Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle

Twenty-first-century Kandinsky: a reappraisal of the Russian abstractionist’s art, life and thought through the extraordinary collection of the iconic museum
One of the foremost artistic innovators of abstraction in the 20th century, Vasily Kandinsky sought to liberate painting from its ties to the natural world and promote the spiritual in art. This richly illustrated publication looks at Kandinsky anew, through a critical lens, reframing our understanding of this vital figure of European modernism, who was also a prolific aesthetic theorist and writer.
A series of thematic essays considers his engagement with avant-garde artistic communities including the Bauhaus, his relationship to improvisation and music, his travels in Europe and Russia, and the influences behind his self-declared anarchist mode of abstraction, among other topics. Tracing Kandinsky’s life and work through his years in Moscow, several cities in Germany, and Paris, the texts offer striking new insights into an artist whose creative production and style were intimately tied to a sense of place―and displacement―and evolved amid the political and social upheavals catalyzed by the Russian Revolution and World Wars I and II.
Kandinsky’s history is closely linked to that of the Guggenheim Museum. Solomon R. Guggenheim began collecting the artist’s work in 1929; a year later, they met at the Bauhaus, in Dessau. This book features more than half of the museum’s deep holdings of works by Kandinsky, presenting the full arc of his artistic development and career. Included are paintings in oil and oil with sand, reverse-glass paintings, as well as woodcuts, watercolors and drawings on paper. An illustrated chronicle of Kandinsky’s life and career, including selected exhibitions and publications, rounds out the volume.

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Robert Motherwell: Early Collages

by Brandon Taylor, Megan Fontanella, Susan Davidson, Jeffrey Warda

Robert Motherwell: Early Collages, published to accompany an exhibition devoted exclusively to Motherwell’s works on paper from the 1940s and early 1950s, reexamines the origins of the artist’s style and his revelatory encounter with the papier collé technique that he described in 1944 as “the greatest of our discoveries.” Motherwell’s enthusiasm for and dedication to the collage medium for the remainder of his career sets him apart from other artists of his generation and extended beyond the mere physical presence of pasted cut-and-torn papers. Featuring approximately 60 works and four essays that delve into artists’ engagements with collage in the first half of the twentieth century, Motherwell’s early career with patron Peggy Guggenheim, underlying humanitarian themes during World War II and the artist’s materials, Early Collages provides a vital reassessment of Motherwell’s work in the collage medium.
Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) studied painting at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, at Stanford, Harvard and Columbia. His first solo show was presented at the Raymond Duncan Gallery in Paris in 1939. In 1941, Motherwell traveled to Mexico with Roberto Matta. After returning to New York, his circle came to include William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollock. In 1944, Motherwell became editor of the Documents of Modern Art series of books, and participated in Fourteen Americans at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946. The artist subsequently taught and lectured throughout the United States. A retrospective of his works organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, traveled throughout the United States from 1983 to 1985.

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