KANDINSKY, Wassily.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Sélection. First edition, presentation copy, inscribed by Kandinsky to Myfanwy Evans on the title page, "Mlle. M. Evans Comme souvenir de sa visite à mon atelier, Kandinsky, Paris 8 IX 34" ("as a souvenir of her visit to my studio"). In the summer of 1934 Evans visited Paris, where she met avant-garde artists including Kandinsky, Giacometti, Arp, Mondrian, and Brancusi. The meetings were decisive: on 26 September Evans wrote to Kandinsky, "I'm going to start an English magazine on abstract art, but abstract only, not surrealism" (Barnett, p. 44).The first issue of Axis, published in January 1935, drew heavily on Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a foundational text of abstraction. The issue also reproduced Kandinsky's "Drawing, 1924"; the reproduction was made directly from this copy, as shown by pencil annotations on page 43 in the hand of Evans's future husband, John Piper, directing the printer to retain Kandinsky's signature. Evans maintained her connection with Kandinsky - the second issue of Axis also included a Kandinsky illustration and Evans's article "Kandinsky's vision", and in 1937 Kandinsky contributed the essay "Empty Canvas, etc" to her anthology The Painter's Object.Sélection was founded in 1920, and from 1928 its numbers became single-artist monographs. This Kandinsky number, published in July 1933, was the last of the series. Edited by Kandinsky's close friend and early champion Will Grohmann, it includes essays and tributes by Zervos, Baumeister,

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