Mr Kandinsky Was a Painter
A little blue horse prances right out of a painting. It gallops through the air, heading for a photograph of its creator: Wassily Kandinsky. Another version of the artist himself is sitting there on a stool in front of his easel, watching the little blue horse.
Daan Remmerts de Vries’s cheerful caricature portrays Kandinsky as a tubby little man with a big head and dabs of red paint for his cheeks.
This book is the first part in a series of picture books about art and artists by Leopold and the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague and looks at Kandinsky and his development as an artist. The author playfully shows how the artist, who started out painting impressionist landscapes, came to concentrate on an almost constructivist abstract style: instead of the world around him, he began to paint his own inner self.
Remmerts de Vries has painted copies of some of Kandinsky’s paintings, including Der blaue Reiter, combining this technique with collages. This artistic approach makes Meneer Kandinsky was een schilder (Mr Kandinsky Was a Painter) a perfect fit within the body of work created by this award-winning author and illustrator (Remmerts de Vries won the Gouden Griffel for the second time in 2010), whose style of illustration is characterised by simple, colourful collages of brightly printed paper and acrylic painting.
“A perfect fit!”
