Vasily Kandinsky (1866‱944), a pioneer of abstraction and important theorist of Modernism, is among the most important and influential painters of the Twentieth Century. One of the first Western artists to create pictures without figurative motifs, he was also the first abstract artist to explain and justify what he was doing. His theoretical writings are among the most significant texts written by any artist of the last century.
Fortunately, Kandinsky’s high art historical stature is matched by the extraordinary quality of his artwork, from early naturalistic landscapes and fairytale subjects to nature-based abstractions and geometric compositions to “pure” abstractions. Expressive color and form and versatility of style characterize each phase of Kandinsky’s career.
That career was played out in the context of the most dramatic †and traumatic †events of the Twentieth Century: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Nazis, the outbreak of World War II and the German occupation of France. These tumultuous circumstances form the complex background to Kandinsky’s notable aesthetic innovations.
Kandinsky’s pivotal role in the emergence of abstract art is beautifully demonstrated in “Kandinsky,” a full-scale retrospective of his work on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through January 13. It comprises nearly 100 of the artist’s most important canvases, complemented by more than 60 works on paper.
The exhibition is organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, in cooperation with the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. It is curated by Tracey Bashkoff, the Guggenheim’s curator of collections and exhibitions; Centre Pompidou’s Musee National d’Art’s curator Christian Derouet and Stadtische Galerie’s curator Annegret Hoberg. Guggenheim Museum assistant curator Karole Vail helped organize the New York presentation.
Kandinsky was born in Moscow to an affluent family that supported his career financially. He studied law and political economics while painting on the side.
In 1892, he married his second cousin, Anya. A partnership between two friends rather than a love match, it ended in divorce in 1911.
In the 1890s, wowed by a Claude Monet “Haystack” painting in a Moscow exhibition, Kandinsky realized that it was the work’s color and composition, not its subject matter, that stirred him. Then, at a concert of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin , he noted that the music could elicit an emotional response without any connection to a recognizable subject. These experiences convinced him that a painting could aspire to be as abstract as music.
The two events “stamped my whole life and shook me to the depths of my being,” Kandinsky said. Before long, he abandoned a promising legal career, and, at the age of 30, he decamped to Munich.
While teaching at an art school, he met 25-year-old Gabriele Munter, a talented German painter, beginning a long and complicated relationship that lasted until 1914. An interesting companion exhibition at the Guggenheim, “Gabriele Munter and Vasily Kandinsky, 1902‱914: A Life in Photographs,” is also up through January 13. Its 31 images chronicle their lives together and offer insights into their public and private personas.
In Munter and Kandinsky traveled widely in Western Europe and Tunisia, finally settling in a Paris suburb. During this time, he painted charming, nostalgic temperas that evoked the Russia of his childhood in fairytale-like vignettes enlivened with chunks of jewel-like color, such as “Colorful Life (Motley Life),” 1907. His staccato brushstrokes, drawing on the expressive quality of Parisian Post-Impressionism, and brilliant palette emulating the Fauves, depicted a wide, colorful slice of old Russian humanity.
Kandinsky and Munter returned to Munich in 1908 and for the next half-dozen years divided their time between there and Murnau, a small village near the Bavarian Alps. Some of Kandinsky’s best work was inspired by the mountainous landscape around Murnau and his lifelong love of horses. In semiabstract images, discernible horses and riders set against mountains or towering buildings are apparent in such bold, Fauvist-bright canvases as “Improvisation 3,” 1909. The horse and rider motif symbolized Kandinsky’s opposition to conventional aesthetic values.
Kandinsky published his first major theoretical writing, On the Spiritual in Art , in 1911. In it he explored connections between theosophical thought and form and color in painting, and considered the potential of music to express inner feelings and ideas. He identified three types of paintings designated by titles associated with music: Impressions (based on real-life subjects), Improvisations (spontaneous, unconscious images from the artist’s inner life) and Compositions (formally developed works). As he followed that musical terminology in naming his paintings, Kandinsky found that music, with its spiritual qualities, was a rewarding area to explore as he moved toward a new visual vocabulary.
By this time, many of Kandinsky’s canvases depicted cataclysmic events and signs of apocalyptic destruction, after which, he averred, the world would be redeemed. His dream of a better, more spiritual future relied heavily on the transforming powers of art.
In a particularly colorful “Sketch for Composition II (Skizze fur Komposition II),” 1909‱910 (a monumental oil painting now destroyed), a wild group of figures and symbols populate a canvas split between the glowing colors of a peaceful, idyllic scene to the right that contrasts with a dark, somber, catastrophic view to the left.
Kandinsky helped form Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), a diverse group of artists united by a common interest in the Expressionist potential of colors and symbolic forms, and for the Russian and some others, in spiritual values. (The name, in part, came from Kandinsky’s predilection for blue in his work and his interest in painting riders on horseback.)
With Franz Marc, an adventurous Munich painter, Kandinsky edited The Blue Rider Almanac in 1912. That publication, plus Blue Rider exhibitions in 1911 and 1912, “have acquired an almost mythical status in the history of Twentieth Century art,” art historian Frank Whitford has written. “They are commonly held to have introduced Modernism into German art, bringing it abreast of the most advanced developments elsewhere.”
Stimulated by contact with avant-garde artists, including Paul Klee and Marc, and musicians like Arnold Schonberg (who broke with harmonic and tonal conventions), Kandinsky entered into a highly creative period, painting prolifically and moving slowly toward complete abstraction. As early as 1910, Kandinsky wrote, “I felt more and more strongly that it is the inner desire of the subject which determines its form&I knew then that objects harmed my painting.”
Recognizing that it was important to develop his abstract style gradually in order to encourage public acceptance and understanding, in many works he retained fragments of recognizable imagery.
In 1911, Kandinsky created a blurry composition with emphatic blues, greens and purples and a few black lines, “Picture with a Circle (Bild mit Kreis),” that is said to be his first completely abstract painting. That same year he painted a brightly colored, nonrepresentational canvas, “Impression III (Concert) (Impression III [Konzert]),” based on hearing a Schonberg concert the night before. Nearly abstract, the painting’s black grand piano and attentive audience are hard to decipher. In “Improvisation 21A,” 1911, dazzling colors give way to dark shapes hovering over hilltop cities, suggesting impending doom.
Impressions of a visit to Moscow inspired “Painting with White Border (Moscow) (Bild mit Weissem Rand [Maskau]),” 1913. Kandinsky featured a Russian troika consisting of three parallel lines at the upper left, perhaps Saint George on horseback wielding a long white lance at the center and an irregular white border.
That same year, he painted another colorful, enigmatic picture, “Small Pleasures (Kleine Freuden),” 1913, which some commentators have interpreted as an apocalyptic vision of hope and ruin, underscored by the confrontation between the sun and darkness in its two halves.
Serving as kind of a coda to this fecund phase in Kandinsky’s career is “Black Lines (Schwarze Linien),” completed in December 1913. Its ovoids of bright blue, green, white and yellow seem to burst out of the canvas in a composition both powerful and appealing.
In 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, this highly creative period came to an abrupt end when Kandinsky, as a Russian, was forced to leave Germany and return to Moscow.
For several years, his work as a prominent teacher and museum administrator limited his time for painting. He did create a fascinating view of his native city, “Moscow 1 (Mockba 1),” 1916, in which he jumbled together on a mountaintop parts of the city †churches with onion domes, towering buildings, houses †in a colorful, kaleidoscopic image.
Following the Russian Revolution of 1919, after being assured that his duties would be of an artistic, not political nature, he served the new communist government in several high posts.
Although he opposed the geometry of their “pure” style, Kandinsky worked with such Suprematist and Constructivist leaders as Kazimir Malevich, Liubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin. Suprematism, founded by Malevich in 1915, used the circle, rectangle, triangle and cross as the basis of an abstract style and vehicle for spiritual ideas. That movement contributed to Constructivism, which featured three-dimensional abstractions made of modern, utilitarian objects like glass, iron, plastic, wire and wood.
The influence of the Suprematists and Constructivists can be seen in several of Kandinsky’s Moscow paintings, notably “Red Sport II (Krasnoe Pyatno II),” and “Blue Segment (Siny Segment),” both 1921.
In 1921, he returned to Germany with his young wife Nina, a former student, whom he had married in 1917. He was hired by Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar, a school of art, architecture and design that sought to establish a modern, machine-age aesthetic. There he bonded with Swiss artist Paul Klee, with whom he shared ideas regarding the correlation between the spiritual and art. The Bauhaus was a congenial place for Kandinsky, who became a German citizen in 1928.
During this period, Kandinsky was influenced by the rationalist predilections of the Bauhaus and the systematization of ideas he used in his own teaching. His formal vocabulary and palette simplified as he experimented with compositions based on geometric motifs.
The manner in which Kandinsky adopted an intuitive, geometric vocabulary, bolstered by the influence of Malevich, is reflected in “White Cross (Weisses Kreuz),” 1923, with its Suprematist-like cross, soft colors and floating organic crescents. “In the Black Square (Im Schwarzen Viereck),” 1923, combines a Malevich-like white cross with various graphic elements.
Considered the masterpiece of Kandinsky’s Bauhaus years, “Composition 8 (Komposition 8),” 1923, is a carefully composed assemblage of abstract elements, geometric shapes and fine black lines. “Yellow-Red-Blue (Gelb-Rot-Blau),” 1925, with its three-color sections from the title, colorful chessboard patterns and black lines of varying widths, echoes ideas contained in his second theoretical book, Point and Line to Plane , 1926.
After the Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close in 1933, Kandinsky’s canvases were confiscated by the Nazis and denounced as examples of “degenerate art.”
Kandinsky settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, where he lived the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939. In spite of his relative isolation, the artist managed to show his work, but was disappointed with sales. He continued to cultivate an American audience through connections with Katherine Dreier, Hilla Rebay, Solomon R. Guggenheim, Alfred Stieglitz and others.
Stimulated by the bright sunshine of Paris, Kandinsky’s paintings of the 1930s were enlivened by a lightly applied, higher-keyed palette. While still complex and symbol-filled, they made more use of amoeboid and other curvilinear shapes, as in “Secession,” 1935, and “Dominant Curve (Courbe Dominante),” 1936.
While teaching at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky had collected botanical and zoological imagery for use in lectures. His continuing interest in the natural sciences and his contacts in Paris with such Surrealists as Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Klee and Joan Miro led to paintings featuring a softer palette and biomorphic forms.
In occupied France, where he worked without interference, Kandinsky’s vocabulary embraced small, organic, amoebalike forms painted with a bright palette, as in “Various Parts (Parties Diverse),” 1940. Even more playful is “Sky Blue (Bleu de Ciel),” of the same year, in which dozens of diminutive, colorful animal-like figures fall gently from a blue sky.
After 1942, cut off from art supplies and isolated by the German occupation, Kandinsky painted only small works on wood or paper. He died of a stroke in 1944, aged 78.
When he began his abstract adventure in 1910, Kandinsky was filled with romantic and lyrical enthusiasm. A man of supreme spiritual commitment, he never stopped looking for new ways to express himself through abstraction.
Kandinsky’s contributions to the development of abstract art †both through his work and writings †cannot be overestimated. He was the leader in a determined effort to create appealing abstract art with aesthetic value, deliberately creating unreal figures, forms and shapes that had no precedent, detached from all representation.
This towering figure of Modernism deserves a grand and glorious retrospective and he gets it at the Guggenheim, an institution where his works constitute the core and essence of the collection †and helped inspire Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated building. It is fitting that in its 50th anniversary year, the landmark structure that is so closely linked to his spirit and in its art should be filled with paintings that encouraged its inception.
The exhibition catalog, priced at $55 (hardcover) and $35 (softcover), overflows with vintage photographs and reproductions of paintings that complement six insightful essays.
The Guggenheim is at 1071 Fifth Avenue. For information, www.Guggenheim.org or 212-423-3500.
