“Kandinsky,” a full-scale retrospective of the paintings of Vasily Kandinsky †visionary artist, theorist and pioneer of abstraction †will be presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from September 18 through January 13.
This comprehensive survey, comprising nearly 100 of Kandinsky’s most important canvases from 1907 to 1942, is drawn primarily from the three largest repositories of the artist’s work †the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau in Munich †which also collaborated in its organization. There are also works from significant private and public collections.
Complemented by more than 60 works on paper from the collections of the Guggenheim and Hilla von Rebay Foundations, this retrospective traces the painter’s oeuvre, focusing on the key events that informed his life and work.
Marked by two world wars and the Russian revolution, Kandinsky’s abstraction did not develop in detachment or isolation. “Kandinsky,” the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s career in the United States since the three surveys mounted by the Guggenheim Museum in the 1980s, reveals the complex background to his aesthetic innovations.
“Kandinsky” was shown at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich and the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris. The collaborative efforts of the Guggenheim, Pompidou and Lenbachhaus have allowed this exhibition to include examples from Kandinsky’s Improvisations, Impressions and Compositions series, and to demonstrate the artist’s formal and conceptual contributions to the course of abstraction in the Twentieth Century.
“Kandinsky” features works that have rarely traveled, seminal work among the first of Kandinsky’s truly abstract canvases that has not been exhibited in the museum’s galleries since the 1970s.
Under the care and preparation of the Guggenheim’s conservation department, three canvases considered extremely delicate due to the artist’s use of sand as well as paint, traveled for the first time in decades to the other venues.
Significant loans from institutions such as Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Russia, as well as the Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi, will introduce works rarely or never seen in the United States.
Kandinsky was a central figure in the history and genesis of the Guggenheim Museum, and this landmark exhibition coincides with the museum’s 50th anniversary year. The museum’s founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim, started acquiring works by Kandinsky in 1929 upon the counsel of Hilla Rebay, who was to become the museum’s first director and who advocated collecting works by Kandinsky in all mediums and from all periods.
Guggenheim paid an historic visit to the artist’s studio at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, in 1930, and over the course of his lifetime ultimately purchased more than 150 Kandinsky paintings. Guggenheim soon became the champion of a particular brand of abstraction known as nonobjective art, and his enthusiasm led to the opening of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939, the direct precursor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Vasily Kandinsky (1866, Moscow‱944, Paris) was one of the pioneers of abstraction and great theorists of Modernism. He published his first major theoretical writing Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Insbesondere in der Malerei (On the Spiritual in Art: And Painting in Particular ), in December 1911.
In 1922, Kandinsky accepted an offer from architect Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus, a school of art, architecture and design in Weimar dedicated to establishing a modern aesthetic. Kandinsky completed his second aesthetic treatise Punkt und Linie zu Fläche. Beitrag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente (Point and Line to Plane: A Contribution to the Analysis of Pictorial Elements) in 1926. The Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close in 1933 and the rise of National Socialism led Kandinsky to abandon Germany for Paris.
An illustrated 320-page catalog accompanies the exhibition, and contains five comprehensive art historical texts and a conservation study of Kandinsky’s work.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is at 1071 Fifth Avenue. For information, 212-423-3500 or www.guggenheim.org .
