The Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky’s Abstract Art by Barb Rosenstock (review)

This fictionalized biography of artist Vassily Kandinsky starts with his childhood, where young Vasya lived a stiff and proper Russian life until he received a gift of paints, whose colors he synesthetically heard as sounds (“The swirling colors trilled like and orchestra tuning up for a magical symphony”). Despite his joy in painting, Vasya turned his back on art and grew up to become a lawyer; when he could resist his colors no longer, he dove back into creating, studying with various painters and eventually debuting his own completely abstract art. While the blend of fiction and nonfiction is a little confusing, the story of a young kid who wants to shake things up will appeal to many junior artists, and the details of Vasya’s sonic joy in color may inspire further artistic exploration. GrandPré’s acrylic illustrations, occasionally enhanced with touches of paper collage, ably convey the gloomy respectability of young Vasya’s household with deep smoky tones weighted down by fusty brocades. Unfortunately, they’re not very successful at expressing his break with propriety; the creamy backgrounds and misty textures undercut the pop of his colors and sometimes lack compositional focus; additionally, the layout, with its tidy borders and common font (save for some peculiar breaks into san serif), has a stodgy conventionality at odds with its subject. Winter’s Just Behave, Pablo Picasso! (BCCB 5/12) is a more effective picture-book treatment of an artist who shattered the rules, but this could add dimension to an exploration of that artistic era or prompt a project combining music and art. An author’s note gives more details about Kandinsky’s life, and a quartet of Kandinsky paintings are reproduced alongside it.