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Review: Kandinsky paintings shine at the Guggenheim Museum
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Picture with a Circle. Kandinsky. 1911. Courtesy Guggenheim Museum
If ever paintings at an exhibition looked like jewels in a jewel box, the Kandinskys at the new Guggenheim show are the ones. Circling up the museum’s spiral ramp to view canvas after vibrant canvas, I was newly amazed by the intense hues of the artist’s work. The color-drenched paintings dazzle equally on close inspection and when viewed across the broad spaces of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous building.
It should come as no surprise that the Kandinsky retrospective looks so stunning. Wright designed the Guggenheim Museum with many of these bold canvasses in mind. The work of Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) had been the core of Solomon R. Guggenheim’s art collection for more than ten years in 1943 when the New York philanthropist commissioned Wright to design a new building to house his museum. Hilla Rebay, art advisor to Guggenheim and director of the museum, made sure Wright understood his mission was to build “a temple of the spirit, a monument” for these and other major non-objective paintings.
Kandinsky is known as the father of abstract art. He was one of the first painters to explore the idea that art could communicate emotion without visual references to the objective world. But one of the most interesting revelations of the Guggenheim show is how rooted in landscape Kandinsky actually was during the first half of his artistic career. Even after he had ostensibly abandoned figurative art in the nineteen-teens, design elements kept turning up that evoke his world—our world—and its many-colored, textured elements.
Although the Guggenheim show begins with fairytale-like scenes such as “Colorful Life” (1907) that suggest Russian lacquered boxes, it’s clear from canvases like “Blue Mountain” (1908-9) and “Improvisation 3” (1909) that very early on Kandinsky was already doing powerfully modern work and thinking in innovative directions. Combining images of mountains, trees, buildings, figures and horses with highly stylized design and brilliant color, he had catapulted himself into the avant-garde by the time he was in his early forties.
Vasily Kandinsky was born in Moscow, studied law and economics there and seemed to be following the path toward a respectable professorship. But, at the age of 30, he made a radical change in his life. Turning down a teaching position, he traveled to Germany to study art in Munich. He exhibited for the first time with the Berlin Secession in 1902 and soon aligned himself with painters including Franz Marc and Paul Klee, and composer Arnold Schönberg, with whom he would found Der Blaue Reiter—the Blue Rider group—almost ten years later.
Unlike Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and many of the Modernists in Paris at the time, Kandinsky was a Romantic. Absorbed in spirituality and the teachings of Theosophist Madame Blavatsky, he cultivated an approach to painting that was intensely subjective. The rigors of Analytical Cubism were not for him. No, Kandinsky may have been living in Europe, but he was a Rrrrussian! He was the child of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, Pushkin, Lermontov and Dostoevsky. The unfettered progress of the soul was his aim. Color was his spiritual currency.
“Color is a means of exerting direct influence upon the soul,” he once said. “Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings.”
Today we may smile at late-19th century and early-20th century Romantic excess—the piano crescendos, the deaths at sword point, the symbolist images and the eccentric spiritualists with their séances. But in painters like Kandinsky, Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, in composers like Alexander Scriabin and in poets like Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva and Rainer Maria Rilke we can find an art that was, in its time, at once Romantic and cutting-edge Modern.
Sidelined then and now by the Gertrude Stein crowd of painters, writers and composers in Paris—the French, Spaniards, Americans and Brits—the artists from the northern and eastern countries still haven’t found their way into the heart of our cultural history books. Yet they represent a radically different approach to modernism and produced some of the period’s most fascinating art.
Kandinsky’s paintings from the years prior to and during the First World War hold up well against some of the more cerebral work by the Paris crowd. His use of color, texture and movement in works like “Picture with an Archer” (1909), “Romantic Landscape” (1911) and “Improvisation 26 (rowing)” (1912) makes contemporary work by Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris seem almost puritanical by comparison.
A series of 4 spectacular panels Kandinsky painted for American businessman Edwin Campbell and shipped to New York on the eve of the war seem to embody the tumult, but also the optimism, of the years leading up to 1914. In one of these, blue, gold, green and vermillion swirl energetically across a creamy field. At first, the work appears to be pure abstraction. But when you step far enough back, a flying figure—possibly an angel—seems to emerge from the cheerful chaos.
The others in the quartet are darker and more determinedly abstract, yet even in these there are shapes and textures that make you stop and stare harder. Is that a red-black planet in the top left corner? Might that fuzzy stuff be animal fur? Could the broken blue streak represent the horizon? Such visual puzzles inevitably lead to questions about the human brain. Is it possible we are hard-wired to find symbols … even where there are none? Or was Kandinsky holding on to the vocabulary of the objective world, even as he claimed to abandon it?
Borrowed from the Museum of Modern Art and hung in a side-room off the Guggenheim’s main spiral, the four panels dazzle with their moods, which range from youthful ebullience to dark forebodings. Within months of the completion of these canvases, trench warfare, shell shock and poison gas changed the world forever. Art, of course, would never be the same again.
On August 1, 1914 Germany declared war on Russia. Two days later, Kandinsky fled Germany for Switzerland. He returned soon thereafter to Russia, where his countrymen were embroiled in the desperate effort to defend their homeland.
In the years that followed, hardship caused Kandinsky’s artistic output to decline. After the Revolution of 1917, he worked for the Bolshevik government as a bureaucrat, setting up new art programs and institutions. And—when he had the time and canvas to paint—he showed alongside the avant-garde Suprematist and Constructivist artists in Moscow.
Clearly, the geometric shapes and hard lines venerated by these movements had their effect on him. “Kandinsky on Paper,” a related show in another of the Guggenheim’s side rooms, presents a series of watercolors and drawings that pay homage to the compass and the straight edge. Arranged chronologically, the works become progressively more soulless as the teens and twenties wear on. Under the influence of the new Soviet order and then the Bauhaus School in Weimar, Germany—to which he eventually fled in 1921, it seems Kandinsky repressed his intuitive, emotional side. At least as far as these works go, he almost succeeded in turning himself into a modernist automaton. Utility, geometry and science were the new gods. Kandinsky, it seems, had learned to worship at their postwar altar.
Always the consummate designer, he continued to turn out competent, even compelling paintings throughout it all. Works like “Red Spot” (1921) and “Yellow-Red-Blue” (1925) may not tingle with the emotional energy of his Blue Rider days, but they are strong visual statements that would look handsome on any wall.
The young Kandinsky—that romantic poet of the paint box—would cringe, I suspect, to hear his later work described this way. Probably, that same young man would also blanche at the paintings themselves. But a chilly equanimity has often become the idiom of artists as they age. So who’s to say for sure whether Kandinsky’s new, streamlined vocabulary came from the Bolsheviks and the Bauhaus crowd or was part of the normal process of aging?
The Kandinsky story does not end in Germany in the twenties though. History was to strike him and his generation a continuous series of blows. In 1933 the Nazis closed down the Bauhaus. It was just the beginning of things to come. Required to prove his Aryan lineage, Kandinsky chose to leave Germany. He settled in France, in a small town outside Paris. There he created lovely but ever more disengaged abstractions. As time wore on, he withdrew more and more from the world.
In 1940, the year the Nazis invaded France, Kandinsky painted “Sky Blue,” an ethereal, Miró-like confection, filled with biomorphic squiggles that buzz like glimmering insects in the afternoon sun. In Paris the Vichy police were patrolling the streets. But at 74 Kandinsky was winding down. Four years later, in December 1944—a few months before V-E Day—Kandinsky died at his home in Neully-sur-Seine.
It had been a long, strange road. This passionate colorist, born into the Romantic 19th century, had matured in the early years of the 20th, survived the First World War and the Russian Revolution, only to die in exile, while the shadow of Fascism still hung over Europe. The works he left behind—over 100 of which are currently at the Guggenheim—are, by turns, arrestingly beautiful and historically fascinating. They tell an alternative story about the birth of modern art. For Kandinsky and a small band of fellow Romantics, the abstract art movement began in the physics of the color palette but spread to the vibrations of the soul.
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