Vasily Kandinsky: Around the World at the Guggenheim

via The New Yorker

Kandinsky, Black Lines (Schwarze Linien), 1913

“Vasily Kandinsky: Around the World takes the viewer from joy to perplexity—or the reverse—depending on where you start on the museum’s ramp.”

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 art-making to lasting effect. 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.

Kandinsky, Landscape with Factory Chimney, 1910

The show’s curator, Megan Fontanella, recommends starting at the bottom, with the overwrought works of the artist’s final phase, and proceeding upward, back to the simpler Expressionist landscapes and horsemen of his early career. 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.

Kandinsky, Gloomy Situation, 1933

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 color, line, and form.

Kandinsky, Composition 9 (Komposition 8), 1923

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.

Now on display through September 5th. Reserve your tickets here.

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