Sounds

Klänge (Sounds) was Kandinsky’s only poetry publication—a collection of prose poems, accompanied by 56 of his own inimitable woodcuts, 12 of them in colour. It appeared in late 1912, or early 1913 (the exact date is uncertain) from the Munich publishing house, Piper, and thus came at a crucial time in Kandinsky’s artistic life: just after he had made the great breakthrough into abstraction, and likewise just after the publication of his seminal text, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art). These were not the only poems that he wrote—others are preserved in the artist’s papers—but these are the ones he chose to publish, and in a lavish edition.