Old Village (Staryj gorodok) from Verses Without Words (Stichi bez slov)

Old Village (Staryj gorodok) from Verses Without Words (Stichi bez slov) is a seminal early graphic work by Vasily Kandinsky, created in 1903. This piece is a meticulously crafted woodcut, illustrating the artist’s deep engagement with printmaking at the beginning of his mature career. The work forms part of the important portfolio Verses Without Words (Stichi bez slov), which comprised twelve main woodcuts alongside extensive supporting graphic elements, including a supplementary woodcut, a woodcut title page, a table of contents, and a colophon.

Executed during a critical transitional period, this print reflects the artistic trends prevalent in the French cultural environment surrounding Kandinsky’s activities in the early 1900s. While Kandinsky is globally renowned for pioneering pure abstraction, the prints from this 1903 phase, such as Old Village, still retain a distinctly figurative and narrative quality, blending Symbolist influences with the emerging aesthetics of Expressionism. Kandinsky masterfully utilized the sharp contrasts and reductive capabilities inherent to the woodcut medium, employing simplified shapes and deep, dense black lines to define the architectural forms of the village structure.

The portfolio Verses Without Words offers crucial insight into the graphic sophistication of Kandinsky before he fully committed to non-objective painting. The twelve woodcuts, produced in 1903, are essential for tracing the evolution of his visual vocabulary, bridging his earlier fascination with Jugendstil and fairy-tale imagery and his later radical breakthroughs in non-representation. This work, alongside the complete collection of Verses Without Words, is held in the esteemed prints and illustrated books collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), serving as a vital reference point for scholars studying Kandinsky’s foundational period and his journey toward abstraction.