Vasily Kandinsky is recognized as a major artistic
innovator and painting theorist. In the opening decades of the
twentieth century, he was among those who advanced
nonrepresentational modes of artmaking to lasting effect. The
artist’s stylistic evolution in this regard was intimately tied to
his sense of place and the communities with which he engaged.
Kandinsky gained insight from meaningful intersections with artists,
musicians, poets, and other cultural producers, especially those who
shared his transnational vision and experimental bent. Uprooted time
and again, he adapted with his every relocation across Germany, back
to Russia, and eventually to France—all against the backdrop of the
socio-political upheavals occurring around him.
In
this exhibition, Kandinsky’s work unfolds in reverse chronological
order, starting with his late-life paintings and proceeding upward
along the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp. His was not a fixed path from
representation to abstraction, but rather a circular passage
traversing persistent themes centred around the pursuit of one
dominant ideal: the impulse for spiritual expression. This, what
Kandinsky called the artist’s “inner necessity,” remained the
guiding principle through the periodic redefinitions of his life and
work.
The
presentation begins with Kandinsky’s final chapter set in France.
The natural sciences and the Surrealist movement, as well as an
abiding interest in Russian and Siberian cultural practices and
folklore, informed his organic imagery and prompted recurrent themes
of renewal and metamorphosis. Paintings from his decade of teaching
at the Bauhaus, a progressive German school, manifest Kandinsky’s
conviction that art could transform self and society and exemplify
the revitalization of his “non-concrete” style following direct
contact with the avant-garde in Russia. The final section of the show
examines Kandinsky’s earliest paintings, made while he was living
around Munich. There he participated in heightened vanguard activity
across multiple disciplines, fluidly moving between painting, poetry,
and stage composition, for example. In time the artist interrogated
the expressive possibilities of colour, line, and form.
At
every turn Kandinsky responded to his environment and developed new
ways to probe the spiritual in art. These paintings, watercolours,
and woodcuts drawn from the museum’s extensive Kandinsky collection
illuminate the journey of an artist who would not leave behind the
precedents of representation or of his own work altogether, even as
he explored the transcendent potential of abstract forms.
Vasily
Kandinsky: Around the Circle is organized by Megan Fontanella,
Curator, Modern Art and Provenance.
Presented
concurrently with Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle is a series of
solo exhibitions on the lower ramps of the Guggenheim rotunda that
features the work of contemporary artists Etel Adnan, Jennie C.
Jones, and Cecilia Vicuña.