Kandinsky retrospective at the Guggenheim

Published: 2009 - September/October, Cultural and Artistic Paths

‘Kandinsky’, a full-scale retrospective of the paintings of Vasily Kandinsky — the visionary artist, theorist, and pioneer of abstraction — is presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York from September 18, 2009, through January 13, 2010. The Russian painter was a central figure in the history and genesis of the Guggenheim Museum, and this landmark exhibition fittingly coincides with the museum’s 50th anniversary year. The founder Solomon R. Guggenheim started acquiring works by Kandinsky in 1929 upon the counsel of the baroness Hilla Rebay, who was to become the museum’s first director and who advocated collecting works by Kandinsky in all mediums and from all periods. Guggenheim paid an historic visit to the artist’s studio at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, in 1930, and over the course of his lifetime ultimately purchased more than 150 Kandinsky paintings. Guggenheim soon became the champion of a particular brand of abstraction known as nonobjective art, which had no ties to the empirical world and aspired to spiritual and utopian goals. His enthusiasm eventually led to the opening of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939, the direct precursor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Permanent galleries were devoted to Kandinsky from the museum’s inception, a practice the Guggenheim Museum has revived in recent years. In 1945, shortly after the artist’s death in Paris, Rebay organized a memorial exhibition at the museum and translated some of his influential writings into English.
‘Kandinsky’, the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s career in the United States since the three surveys mounted by the Guggenheim Museum in the 1980’s, reveals the complex background to his aesthetic innovations. Comprising nearly 100 of Kandinsky’s most important canvases from 1907 to 1942, it is drawn primarily, is drawn primarily from the three largest repositories of the artist’s work— the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau in Munich — as well as from significant private and public collections.
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 unprecedented collaborative 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. Under the care and preparation of the Guggenheim’s conservation department, three canvases considered extremely delicate due to the artist’s use of sand as well as paint, traveled for the first time in decades to the other venues. Significant loans from institutions such as Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Russia, as well as the Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi, introduce works rarely or never seen in the United States. For exemple, Colorful Life (Motley Life) (Das bunte Leben, 1907), which adds to 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. The survey traces Kandinsky’s thematic motifs, such as the horse and rider, mountainous landscapes, tumultuous seascapes, apocalyptic imagery, and other sacred subject-matter references, and follows the artist’s painted realizations of his well-developed aesthetic theories, allowing a reexamination of the periods traditionally applied to his oeuvre.

For information:
www.guggenheim.org