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Kandinsky at the Guggenheim is a symphony of a life-long collaboration
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The Kandinsky and the Guggenheim names have been fatefully joined since 1929, when Solomon R. Guggenheim bought 150 of Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings, upon advice from an artist-friend. Almost a hundred years later, they blend masterfully as the paintings lead visitors up the conch-like path, which appears as one story on the way up, and a new tale upon descent. This exhibition aptly coincides with the museum’s 50th anniversary year.
International collaboration allowed for 100 of Kandinsky’s paintings to line the walls of the crustaceous museum, some who have never been in the same room together since the painter waited for their paint to dry. The exhibition was shown earlier this year at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, and the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, before its presentation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
The extraordinary mutual 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 20th-century. The show features works that have rarely traveled altogether, such as the Lenbachhaus’s early masterpiece Colorful Life (Motley Life) (Das bunte Leben, 1907), and the Guggenheim Museum’s Light Picture (Helles Bild, December 1913)—a seminal work among the first of Kandinsky’s truly abstract canvases that has not been exhibited in the museum’s own galleries since the 1970s—allowing for new contexts and comparisons for all the works.
The walk traces Kandinsky’s thematic motifs, such as the horse and rider, mountainous landscapes, tumultuous seascapes, apocalyptic imagery, and follows the artist’s painted realizations of his “heroic period”, in which the artist felt he finally found the “absolute, non-objective image”, as Kandinsky noted in considering his process. He defined the ‘absolute’ as things that came together as a product of natural laws, as independent beings. The stroll up the ramp was a rise to the artistic freedom he sought, found and rebelled against.
Kandinsky studied extensively the psychology of color, and how their interactions manifest emotional impact. Because of this, he was also deeply involved in the music of the time, claiming a new “emancipation of dissonance”, and the relation between his progress and musicians emulating this at the time, like Arnold Schonberg, is obvious. It was the sounds of Kandinsky’s ‘absolute’. Kandinsky felt that color objectified sound in a powerful manner, and vice verse. Kandinsky believed that painting should be structed around abstract laws, like music. He labeled many of his pieces as a result in musical terms, Impressions, Compositions, and Improvisations.
An illustrated 320-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition, and contains five comprehensive art historical texts and a conservation study of Kandinsky’s work. The contributors to the catalogue are Vivian Endicott Barnett, art historian and Kandinsky scholar; Tracey Bashkoff, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Christian Derouet, Curator at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Matthias Haldemann, Director, Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland; Annegret Hoberg, Curator at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; and Gillian McMillan, Senior Conservator, Collections, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The catalogue also features an extensive illustrated chronology compiled by Hoberg, as well as a selected bibliography. Priced at $55 for the hardcover and $35 for the softcover, the exhibition catalogue Kandinsky can be purchased at the Guggenheim Store or at the Online Store at guggenheimstore.org.
Admission: Adults $18, students/seniors (65+) $15, members and children under 12 free. Admission includes audio tour.
Museum Hours: Sun–Wed, 10 am–5:45 pm; Fri, 10 am–5:45 pm; Sat, 10 am–7:45 pm; closed Thurs. On Saturdays, beginning at 5:45 pm, the museum hosts Pay What You Wish. For general information call 212 423 3500 or visit guggenheim.org.
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