Vasily Kandinsky, Dominant Curve (Courbe dominante), April 1936, Oil on canvas, 50-7/8 x 76-1/2", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection.
Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version) (Improvisation 28 [zweite Fassung]), 1912, Oil on canvas, 43-7/8 x 63 7/8", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift.
Vasily Kandinsky, Composition 8 (Komposition 8), July 1923, Oil on canvas, 55-1/8 x 79-1/8", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift.
Irene Guggenheim, Vasily Kandinsky, Hilla Rebay, and Solomon R. Guggenheim, Dessau, July 1930, Hilla von Rebay Foundation Archive. M0007, Photograph by Nina Kandinsky, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York.
Vasily Kandinsky, Dans le gris (Im Grau), 1919, Huile sur toile – 129 x 176cm, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Legs, Nina Kandinsky, 1981, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris, Photo : Adam Rzepka, © ADAGP, Paris 2009.
Vasily Kandinsky, Lyrisches,1911, Huile sur toile – 94 x 100 cm, Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, © ADAGP, Paris 2009.
Vasily Kandinsky, Impression III (Konzert), 1911, Huile sur toile – 77,50 x 100 cm, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, StUadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Gabriele Münter-Stiftung, © ADAGP, Paris 2009.
Vasily Kandinsky, Accord réciproque, 1942, Huile et laque sur toile – 114 x 146cm, Donation, Nina Kandinsky, 1976, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris, Photo : Georges Meguerditchian, © ADAGP, Paris 2009.
Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation 19, 1911, Huile sur toile – 120 x 141,5 cm, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Städtische, Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Gabriele Münter-Stiftung, © ADAGP, Paris 2009.
Vasily Kandinsky, Mit dem Schwarzen Bogen, 1912, Huile sur toile – 189 x 198 cm, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Donation, Nina Kandinsky, 1976, Centre Pompidou, Musé e national d'art moderne, Paris, Photo : Philippe Migeat, © ADAGP, Paris 2009.
Vasily Kandinsky, Einige Kreise, 1926, Huile sur toile – 100,5 x 80,5, Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding, Collection, by gift, © ADAGP, Paris. 2009.
Vasily Kandinsky, Moskau I, 1916, Huile sur toile – 51,5 x 49,5, Galerie Tretiakov, Moscou, Galerie Tretiakov, Moscou, © ADAGP, Paris 2009.
Vasily Kandinsky, In the Black Square (Im schwarzen Viereck), June 1923, Oil on canvas, 38-3/8 x 36-5/8", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift.
Vasily Kandinsky, Blue Mountain (Der blaue Berg), 1908-09, Oil on canvas, 41-3/4 x 38", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift.
Vasily Kandinsky, Mouvement I, 1935, Technique mixte sur toile – 116 x 89cm, Galerie Tretiakov, Moscou, Galerie nationale Tretiakov, Moscou, © ADAGP, Paris 2009. |
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Centre Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou
+33 1 44 78 12 33
Paris
Galerie 1, Level 6
Kandinsky
April 8-August 10, 2009
Kandinsky offers, for the first time in more than 25 years, a comprehensive overview of the work of Russian artist Vasily Kandinsky, documenting key periods of his artistic career (Munich, Paris / Munich / Moscow / Weimar, Dessau, Berlin / Paris) through a selection of major paintings dating from 1907 to 1942. Thanks to the collaboration between Centre Pompidou, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, this international retrospective, showing in Munich, Paris and New York, has been able to draw on the three largest public collections of Kandinsky’s work, as well as loans from other institutions and private collections.
Through some hundred exceptional paintings, this unique exhibition examines Kandinsky’s contribution to modern art, its chronological organisation revealing the logical unfolding of his ideas and his relationship to his time.
At the Centre Pompidou, the retrospective is complemented by a selection of recent additions to the Centre’s own holding of Kandinsky’s work: watercolours and manuscripts of the so-called “Russian” period from 1914 to 1917, and the Bauhaus portfolio celebrating his 60th birthday in 1926. The last major Kandinsky exhibition in Paris was held at the Centre Pompidou in 1984, to mark the accession of the Nina Kandinsky Bequest.
Kandinsky is curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Associate Curator for Collections and Exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Christian Derouet, Curator at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Annegret Hoberg, Curator at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Karole Vail, Assistant Curator, assisted with the organization of the New York presentation.
The exhibition offers a comprehensive chronological survey of Kandinsky’s work through a selection of his most important canvases, including examples from his series of Improvisations, Impressions, and Compositions, while investigating his formal and conceptual contributions to the course of abstraction in the 20th-century. The unprecedented collaborative efforts of Guggenheim, Pompidou, and Lenbachhaus assembles works that have rarely traveled together, such as Munich’s early masterpiece, A Colorful Life (1907), or the Guggenheim’s Light Picture (1913) — a seminal work among the first of Kandinsky’s truly abstract canvases which has not even been exhibited in the museum’s own galleries since the 1970s — offering new contexts and comparisons for those works that have been held apart.
Under the care and preparation of the Guggenheim’s conservation department, four canvases considered extremely delicate due to the artist’s use of sand mixed into his painting medium, travel for the first time in decades. Significant loans to be confirmed from Russian institutions such as Nizhni Novgorod State Museum , the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the State Tretyakov Gallery introduce works little seen in the United States.
The survey will trace Kandinsky’s vision through thematic motifs, such as the horse and rider, mountainous landscapes and tumultuous seascapes, apocalyptic imagery and other religious subjects, and follow the artist’s painted realizations of his well-developed aesthetic theories, allowing a re-examination of the geographical- and time-based periods traditionally applied to his oeuvre.
Kandinsky (16 December 1866-13 December 1944) a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist, was of the most famous of 20th-century artists, he is credited with painting the first modern abstract works.
Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose to study law and economics. Quite successful in his profession — he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat — he started painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.
In 1896 he settled in Munich and studied first in the private school of Anton Azbe and then at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He went back to Moscow in 1914 after World War I started. He was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow and returned to Germany in 1921. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived the rest of his life, and became a French citizen in 1939. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.
Kandinsky's creation of purely abstract work followed a long period of development and maturation of intense theoretical thought based on his personal artistic experiences. He called this devotion to inner beauty, fervor of spirit, and deep spiritual desire inner necessity, which was a central aspect of his art.
Kandinsky learned from a variety of sources during his youth and life in Moscow. Later in his life, he would recall being fascinated and unusually stimulated by color as a child. The fascination with color symbolism and psychology continued as he grew. In 1889 he was part of an ethnographic research group that travelled to the Vologda region north of Moscow. In Looks on the Past he relates that the houses and churches were decorated with such shimmering colors that, upon entering them, he had the impression that he was moving into a painting. The experience and his study of the folk art in the region, in particular the use of bright colors on a dark background, was reflected in much his early work. A few years later, he first related the act of painting to creating music in the manner for which he would later become noted and wrote, "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings."
It was not until 1896, at the age of 30, that Kandinsky gave up a promising career teaching law and economics to enroll in art school in Munich. He was not immediately granted admission in Munich and began learning art on his own. Also in 1896, prior to leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of paintings by Monet and was particularly taken with the famous impressionistic Haystacks which, to him, had a powerful sense of color almost independent of the objects themselves. Later he would write about this experience:
"That it was a haystack the catalogue informed me. I could not recognize it. This non-recognition was painful to me. I considered that the painter had no right to paint indistinctly. I dully felt that the object of the painting was missing. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably on my memory. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendour."
He was similarly influenced during this period by Richard Wagner's Lohengrin which, he felt, pushed the limits of music and melody beyond standard lyricism.
Kandinsky was also spiritually influenced by H. P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), the most important exponent of Theosophy in modern times. Theosophical theory postulates that creation is a geometrical progression, beginning with a single point. The creative aspect of the forms is expressed by the descending series of circles, triangles, and squares. Kandinsky's book Concerning the Spiritual In Art (1910) and Point and Line to Plane (1926) echoed this basic Theosophical tenet.
Kandinsky's time at art school, typically considered difficult to get through, was eased by the fact that he was older and more settled than the other students. It was during this time that he began to emerge as a true art theorist in addition to being a painter. The number of existing paintings increased at the beginning of the 20th century and much remains of the many landscapes and towns that he painted, using broad swathes of color but recognizable forms. For the most part, however, Kandinsky's paintings did not emphasize any human figures. An exception is Sunday, Old Russia (1904) where Kandinsky recreates a highly colorful (and fanciful) view of peasants and nobles before the walls of a town. Riding Couple (1907) depicts a man on horseback, holding a woman with tenderness and care as they ride past a Russian town with luminous walls across a river. Yet the horse is muted, while the leaves in the trees, the town, and the reflections in the river glisten with spots of color and brightness. The work shows the influence of pointillism in the way the depth of field is collapsed into a flat luminescent surface. Fauvism is also apparent in these early works. Colors are used to express the artist's experience of subject matter, not to describe objective nature.
Perhaps the most important of Kandinsky's paintings from the first decade of the 1900s was The Blue Rider (1903), which shows a small cloaked figure on a speeding horse rushing through a rocky meadow. The rider's cloak is a medium blue, and the shadow cast is a darker blue. In the foreground are more amorphous blue shadows, presumably the counterparts of the fall trees in the background. The Blue Rider in the painting is prominent, but not clearly defined, and the horse has an unnatural gait (which Kandinsky must have known). Indeed, some believe that a second figure, a child perhaps, is being held by the rider, though this could just as easily be another shadow from a solitary rider. This type of intentional disjunction, allowing viewers to participate in the creation of the artwork, would become an increasingly conscious technique used by Kandinsky in subsequent years, culminating in the (often nominally) abstract works of the 1911-1914 period. In The Blue Rider Kandinsky shows the rider more as a series of colors than of specific details. In and of itself, The Blue Rider is not exceptional in that regard when compared to contemporary painters, but it does show the direction that Kandinsky would take only a few years later.
From 1906 to 1908 Kandinsky spent a great deal of time travelling across Europe, (he was an associate of the Blue Rose symbolist group of Moscow) until he settled in the small Bavarian town of Murnau. The Blue Mountain (1908-1909) was painted at this time and shows more of his trend towards pure abstraction. A mountain of blue is flanked by two broad trees, one yellow and one red. A procession of some sort with three riders and several others crosses at the bottom. The faces, clothing, and saddles of the riders are each a single color, and neither they nor the walking figures display any real detail. The broad use of color in The Blue Mountain, illustrates Kandinsky's move towards an art in which color is presented independently of form.
The paintings of the Blue Rider period (1911-1914) are composed of large and very expressive colored masses evaluated independently from forms and lines which serve no longer to delimit them but are superimposed and overlap in a very free way to form paintings of an extraordinary force.
The influence of music has been very important on the birth of abstract art, as it is abstract by nature — it does not try to represent the exterior world but rather to express in an immediate way the inner feelings of the human soul. Kandinsky sometimes used musical terms to designate his works; he called many of his most spontaneous paintings "improvisations", while he entitled more elaborated works "compositions".
In addition to painting Kandinsky developed his voice as an art theorist. In fact, Kandinsky's influence on the history of Western art stems perhaps more from his theoretical works than from his paintings. He helped to found the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists' Association) and became its president in 1909. The group was unable to integrate the more radical approach of those like Kandinsky with more conventional ideas of art and the group dissolved in late 1911. Kandinsky then moved to form a new group The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) with like minded artists such as August Macke and Franz Marc. The group released an almanac, called The Blue Rider Almanac, and held two exhibits. More of each were planned, but the outbreak of World War I in 1914 ended these plans and sent Kandinsky home to Russia via Switzerland and Sweden.
Kandinsky's writing in The Blue Rider Almanac and the treatise On the Spiritual In Art, which was released at almost the same time, served as both a defense and promotion of abstract art, as well as an appraisal that all forms of art were equally capable of reaching a level of spirituality. He believed that color could be used in a painting as something autonomous and apart from a visual description of an object or other form.
"The sun melts all of Moscow down to a single spot that, like a mad tuba, starts all of the heart and all of the soul vibrating. But no, this uniformity of red is not the most beautiful hour. It is only the final chord of a symphony that takes every color to the zenith of life that, like the fortissimo of a great orchestra, is both compelled and allowed by Moscow to ring out."
— Wassily Kandinsky
Through the years 1918 to 1921, Kandinsky dealt with the cultural development politics of Russia and collaborated in the domains of art pedagogy and museum reforms. He devoted his time to artistic teaching with a program based on form and color analysis, as well as participating in the organization of the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow. He painted little during this period. In 1916 he met Nina Andreievskaia, who in the following year became his wife. His spiritual, expressionistic view of art was ultimately rejected by the more radical members of the Institute as too individualistic and bourgeois. In 1921 Kandinsky received the mission to go to Germany to attend the Bauhaus of Weimar, on the invitation of its founder, the architect Walter Gropius.
The Bauhaus was an innovative architecture and art school whose objectives included the merging of plastic arts with applied arts, reflected in its teaching methods based on the theoretical and practical application of the plastic arts synthesis. Kandinsky taught the basic design class for beginners, the course on advanced theory as well as conducting painting classes and a workshop where he completed his color theory with new elements of form psychology. The development of his works on forms study, particularly on point and different forms of lines, lead to the publication of his second major theoretical book Point and Line to Plane in 1926.
Geometrical elements took on increasing importance in his teaching as well as in his painting, particularly circle, half-circle, the angle, straight lines and curves. This period was a period of intense production. The freedom of which is characterised in each of his works by the treatment of planes rich in colors and magnificent gradations as in the painting Yellow – red – blue (1925), where Kandinsky shows his distance from constructivism and suprematism movements whose influence was increasing at this time.
The large two meter width painting that is Yellow – red – blue (1925) consists of a number of main forms: a vertical yellow rectangle, a slightly inclined red cross and a large dark blue circle, while a multitude of straight black or sinuous lines, arcs of circles, monochromatic circles and scattering of colored checkerboards contribute to its delicate complexity. This simple visual identification of forms and of the main colored masses present on the canvas only corresponds to a first approach of the inner reality of the work whose right appreciation necessitates a much deeper observation—not only of forms and colors involved in the painting, but also of their relation, their absolute position and their relative disposition on the canvas, of their whole and reciprocal harmony.
Kandinsky was one of Die Blaue Vier (Blue Four), with Klee, Feininger and von Jawlensky formed in 1923. They lectured and exhibited together in the USA in 1924.
In front of the hostility of the political parties of the right, the Bauhaus left Weimar and settled in Dessau from 1925. Following a fierce slander campaign from the Nazis, the Bauhaus closed at Dessau in 1932. The school pursued its activities in Berlin until its dissolution in July 1933. Kandinsky then left Germany and settled in Paris.
In Paris he was quite isolated since abstract painting—particularly geometric abstract painting—was not recognized, the artistic fashions being mainly Impressionism and cubism. Kandinsky lived in a small apartment and created his work in a studio constructed in the living room. Biomorphic forms with supple and non-geometric outlines appear in his paintings; forms which suggest externally microscopic organisms but which always express the artist's inner life. He used original colour compositions which evoke Slavonic popular art and which are similar to precious watermark works. He also occasionally mixed sand with paint to give a granular texture to his paintings.
This period corresponds, in fact, to a vast synthesis of his previous work, of which he used all elements, even enriching them. In 1936 and 1939 he painted his two last major compositions; canvases particularly elaborate and slowly ripped that he hadn't produced for many years. Composition IX is a painting with highly contrasted powerful diagonals and whose central form give the impression of a human embryo in the womb. The small squares of colors and the colored bands seem to stand out against the black background of Composition X, as stars' fragments or filaments, while enigmatic hieroglyphs with pastel tones cover the large maroon mass, which seems to float in the upper left corner of the canvas.
In Kandinsky’s works, some characteristics are obvious while certain touches are more discrete and veiled; that is to say they reveal themselves only progressively to those who make the effort to deepen their connection with his work. He intended his forms, which he subtly harmonized and placed, to resonate with the observer's own soul.
The exhibition was presented at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich from October 25, 2008, through February 22, 2009 and will be shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York from September 18, 2009, to January 10, 2010.
A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, providing comprehensive art historical and conservation study of Kandinsky’s work. Contributors to the catalogue include Vivian Barnett, art historian and Kandinsky scholar; Tracey Bashkoff; Christian Derouet; Matthias Haldemann, Director of the Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland; Annegret Hoberg; and Gillian McMillan, Senior Conservator, Collections at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The catalogue will also feature an illustrated chronology compiled by Hoberg as well as a selected bibliography. |
