NIU Art Museum

The Northern Illinois University Art Museum presents: Wassily Kandinsky: Klänge from March 29 – May 14.

Kandinsky’s Klänge,  (German for Sounds), considered to be one of the most significant artist’s books of the twentieth century, was hand-printed and published in a limited edition in 1913 and.  For Klänge, Kandinsky created color and black & white woodcuts, juxtaposed with his poetry to assert the syntactical importance of pattern and variation, and to suggest the equivalence of the visible and the audible.  Klänge was one of Kandinsky's attempts to “set the soul vibrating” by uncovering the "pure sound" of language.

An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 31, from 4:30 – 6 p.m.  with a lecture following at 6:00 p.m. by Eva-Maria Worthington, owner of Worthington Gallery, a Chicago gallery specializing in German Expressionism.  The public is also invited to a reading of selected Klänge poems, in the original German, with Katharina Barbe, Chair, Department of Foreign Languages , on Friday, April 8, at 12:15.