"Picture With a Circle" (1911), part of a major retrospective of this
Russian visionary that fills the rotunda of the Guggenheim.
The Russian avant-gardist Wassily Kandinsky — who dressed like the
college professor he had trained to be and sounded like a mystic when he
wasn’t thinking like a scientist — is the central god in the Guggenheim
pantheon and genesis myth. The museum owns more of his work than of any
other major Modernist and mounts some form of full-dress Kandinsky show
like clockwork every 20 years or so.
It’s that time again. The
Guggenheim’s last excursion into Kandinsky occurred in the early 1980s
with three context-heavy exhibitions that examined his activities in all
mediums, including his Art Nouveau embroidery and works by contemporary
artists and designers. This one takes the opposite tack. It distills
Kandinsky’s momentous career to about 100 paintings, with a large side
order of works on paper displayed in an adjacent gallery. The canvases
and almost nothing else fill Frank Lloyd Wright’s great rotunda from bottom to top, sometimes at the magisterial rate of one painting per bay.
This
looks sensational. Organized with the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus
in Munich and the Pompidou Center in Paris — sites of the world’s
other major Kandinsky collections — it contains stupendous loans from
all over.
The 1911 “Picture With a Circle” from the Georgian
National Museum in Tbilisi has never been in this country. A big,
gorgeous blur of resonant blues, greens and purples electrified by a few
black lines across the top, it is said to be the artist’s first
completely abstract painting. But this is only relative: Kandinsky is so
pertinent to the present because he tended to ignore the distinctions
between abstraction and representation.
In all, this show is the
perfect cap to the Guggenheim’s yearlong birthday celebration of
Wright’s building, which opened 50 years ago on Oct. 21.
Lots of museums have foundational artists. The Museum of Modern Art has Picasso and Matisse; the Whitney Museum of American Art, Edward Hopper.
But Kandinsky is the angel in the architecture at the Guggenheim; he’s
part of the bedrock. The circling ramp of Wright’s rotunda was surely
designed with that Russian’s swirling, unanchored abstractions in mind.
Kandinsky’s precarious, ever-moving compositions suggest that he never
met a diagonal he didn’t like; Wright obliged with a museum on a
perpetual tilt.
Wright might deny the connection, but he was
chosen by Hilla Rebay, a German painter and the museum’s founding
director, and she had Kandinsky on the brain. Solomon R. Guggenheim, her
patron, caught the fever, and between 1929 and his death in 1949, he
acquired scores of works by the artist. All were given to the Museum of
Non-Objective Painting, which he and Rebay founded in 1937. (It was
renamed in Guggenheim’s honor in 1952.)
The purity of the present
show limits Kandinsky’s immensity a bit. It simplifies a vision that
held music, painting and language as part of a continuum and relegates
his activities as theoretician, essayist, poet and (arts) community
organizer to the show’s informative, discreetly placed wall texts. In
both of his best-known books — “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” (1912)
and “Point and Line to Plane” (1926) — he displays a remarkable ability
to reconcile the redemptive power of art’s “inner pulsations,” meant to
be experienced “with all one’s senses” and exacting diagrams of the
formal effect of different colors, shapes and lines, each of which he
felt had a distinct sound. There are formalist possibilities in these
pages that Clement Greenberg never imagined.
The impact of his
thought on his contemporaries was tremendous. It is always startling to
learn, for example, that Hugo Ball and the Zurich Dadaists revered
Kandinsky, included his paintings in their exhibitions and read his
poetry at their soirees. Some of these poems are virtual prescriptions
for performance art. For example, “Not,” in his collection “Sounds”
(1912), describes a “jumping man” who “dug a small very round
depression” in the ground and “jumped over it without stopping every day
from 4 o’clock to 5.” More than a few gallery receptionists of the
moment have witnessed things like that.
Kandinsky was alternately
propelled by ambition and history itself. By 1901, barely six years
after the combined experiences of a Monet
“Haystack” and Wagner’s “Lohengrin” jolted him, at 30, to leave Russia
for art study in Munich, he had rebelled against the academy and
organized like-minded colleagues into the Phalanx. He would go on to
become the founding president of the New Artists Association in Munich
in 1909. Two years later, when that body chafed at his abstract
tendencies, he left to form the Blue Rider group with, among others, the
painters Franz Marc, Alexej von Jawlensky and Gabriele Münter, for
whom he had left his first wife in 1907.
The outbreak of World
War I forced him back to Russia, where he joined the Constructivist
experiment, as well as the government bureaucracy. In 1921 he and his
new wife, Nina, repaired to Berlin, pushed by physical privation and
the rejection of Kandinsky’s teaching ideas. By 1922, he was teaching at
the Bauhaus and living next door to his great friend Paul Klee.
But this idyll ended when the Nazis closed the school in 1933. Then it
was on to Paris, the last stop, where he worked, despite increasingly
scant art supplies, until his death in 1944.
The Guggenheim’s
lean, clean presentation makes the show as much a Kandinsky-Wright
reunion as a retrospective. After Kandinsky’s early chivalric fantasies
and landscapes with their vivid stained-glass colors on the rotunda’s
first level, the compositions explode into centrifugal abstractions and
semi-abstractions that echo Wright’s plunging space-for-space’s-sake
rotunda. Nearly each of the exploratory works from 1909 to 1914 — there
are more than 40 here — is a hole in the membrane of observable reality
that reveals a nonobjective cosmos defined by tangles of line and
colored shapes and shadings. Each is a brave new crowded world in free
fall, full of more forms, colors and agitation than any single painting
needs.
But mainly the show offers an unencumbered view of
Kandinsky’s painting career and a style that he adjusted with every
change of setting, tending toward Constructivism in Moscow, toward Klee
at the Bauhaus and toward a Surrealist-tinged biomorphism — for which he
had laid the groundwork 20 years earlier — in Paris. Not surprisingly,
he bristled at the suggestion that he had been influenced by Arp and
Miró.
Kandinsky’s stature is always a bit wobbly in New York,
where the Modern’s heavy-duty Francophilia has had such a long run. This
show allows reassessment of the conventional wisdom that his art went
into fairly steep decline after 1921, or even 1914. I think one problem
is that Kandinsky did not make cleanly resolved masterpieces. He never
painted a perfect picture.
His Munich abstractions, which contain
hints of landscapes and of his mounted knights, in particular defy
resolution. They try to catch art’s transformative powers in the act and
are in essence Process-Art narratives.
But the surprise of this
show is the strong case it makes for Kandinsky’s long-disparaged Paris
paintings, where his colors fade to delicate pastels, his brushy
surfaces tighten up, and he catalogs biomorphic form to an extent
unmatched by any of his colleagues in that city. Unlike the Munich
pictures, which for all their wonderfulness are somewhat repetitive,
these paintings are different every time out.
The view that these
works are finicky, designy period pieces doesn’t recede entirely here.
But with time, the notion that a great artist’s late phase has once more
been seriously underestimated could prevail. Kandinsky, the most
well-rounded and compleat of Modernist prophets, always had more ideas
than he knew what to do with. At the end of his hectic, productive life,
he finally began to lay them out one at a time. This marvelous show
starts settling the dust.
“Kandinsky”
opens on Friday and continues through Jan. 13 at the Guggenheim Museum,
1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street; (212) 423-3500, guggenheimdotorgga.
Art Review
Back in the Blue Saddle, for a Gallop to Abstraction
Neue Galerie Examines 15 Years of Kandinsky
Musée National d'Art Moderne. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
Kandinsky’s sketch of a panel
for a 1922 art show in Berlin. The mural has been recreated for the
exhibition at the Neue Galerie.
By
KAREN ROSENBERG
Published: October 3, 2013
New Yorkers might be forgiven for greeting “Vasily Kandinsky: From Blaue
Reiter to the Bauhaus, 1910-1925,” at the Neue Galerie, with a shrug
and a distinct feeling of déjà vu. Wasn’t it just three years ago now
that the Guggenheim mounted a full retrospective, a delirium-inducing helix of Kandinskys?
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.
This, however, is a different kind of show: a boutique Kandinsky
exhibition at a boutique museum. (Surprisingly, it’s the first
all-Kandinsky affair in the Neue’s 12-year history). And it centers on a
rich period — also the purview of the Museum of Modern Art’s recent “Inventing Abstraction,
1910-1925” — that saw Kandinsky moving from the prismatic Expressionism
of Der Blaue Reiter, the Munich-based artist group named for the motif
of a blue horse and rider, into pure abstraction and from easel
paintings into set designs and decorative murals.
The exhibition is further distinguished by a reconstruction of one of
those mural projects, first made for the 1922 Juryfreie Kunstschau
(Jury-Free Art Show) in Berlin: a total Kandinsky immersion, with
brightly colored lines and circles and wobbly little forms glowing
against black and dark-brown walls.
Elsewhere the installation is choppy, as is often the case in these
galleries. Walls have been color-blocked in shades of lavender, ivory
and plum, as if viewers could not be trusted to distinguish between,
say, Kandinsky’s woozy Blaue Reiter paintings and the clean-edged
geometry of his Bauhaus phase. The inescapable soundtrack of Mussorgsky
and Schoenberg does not help to smooth things over.
But over all, the show’s fits and starts feel true to Kandinsky’s
growing pains during these formative years for abstract art. They also
make clear that his philosophies, codified in his famous book “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” did not always mesh with the more pragmatic approaches of his colleagues and collectors.
As an instructor at the Bauhaus, for instance, where he taught from 1922
until it was shuttered by the Nazis in 1933, he chafed at the school’s
idea of painting as an applied art. “Many demand that we should serve
industry, that we should supply patterns for materials, ties, socks,
crockery, parasols, ashtrays, carpets,” he wrote. “Or that we should
leave off painting pictures once and for all.”
Organized by the art historian Jill Lloyd, the show stresses networks
and associations over chronology. It moves from the Blaue Reiter years
of 1911-14 to the Bauhaus, but then backtracks to a gallery of larger
paintings made for American collectors around the time of the 1913
Armory Show. From there it skips to the experimental theater and mural
work, concluding with the Jury-Free project of 1922.
All of this back-and-forth can make the show feel a bit unmoored.
Fortunately, it’s stabilized by some judicious loans, among them Franz
Marc’s mystically intense painting “The Large Blue Horses” from the
Walker Art Center and such Kandinsky works as “Fugue” from the Fondation
Beyeler in Basel, the Guggenheim’s “Painting with White Border,” and
several abstractions from the Yale University Art Gallery’s important
“Société Anonyme” collection.
Yale’s “Improvisation 7 (Storm),” from 1910, for instance, hangs next to
two early Kandinsky streetscapes (1908 and 1909) from the Neue’s
collection; together, these works show him making a transition out of
Post-Impressionism, melting down its forms without changing the acidity
of the palette.
And in the next gallery, four works from MoMA reveal Kandinsky’s deep
ambivalence about the decorative possibilities of abstract painting.
Titled “The Seasons,” these brushy, densely patterned panels were
painted in 1914 for the foyer of the auto magnate Edwin R. Campbell’s
Park Avenue apartment.
The collector Arthur Jerome Eddy, who knew Campbell and helped Kandinsky
secure the commission, had suggested that the panels be modeled on an
earlier painting in his own collection, one “so brilliant in color that
it makes a beautiful wall decoration.” In three of the Campbell panels,
Kandinsky complied, but the remaining one is noticeably darker and
muddier — signaling, perhaps, a level of discomfort with the
appreciation of his paintings as a kind of benign wallpaper.
For him, expanding painting from easels to walls was part of a larger
mission to bring the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total
artwork, into the 20th century. As the catalog essayist Rose-Carol
Washton Long points out, that mission was as political as it was
aesthetic; Kandinsky advocated clashes of sound and color, “multiple
dissonant stimuli,” the better to disrupt complacency.
With the murals for the Jury-Free show, he had a chance to practice
environmental painting on his own terms. The setting, an octagonal
entrance hall for a modern art museum, was ideal for a wraparound
artwork. Directing a team of students from the Bauhaus mural workshop,
Kandinsky had them paint a scattering of geometric and biomorphic shapes
on large canvas-covered wood panels. The originals were dismantled at
the close of the 1922 Show and subsequently lost, but process
photographs and a complete set of sketches survive.
One peculiar problem plagues the Neue’s re-creation, which has been
executed by Daedalus Design and Production and is accompanied by
recordings of atonal piano pieces by Schoenberg: the paintings have been
reproduced exactingly from Kandinsky’s sketches, as if they had been
enlarged, so that each wobble of the brush or hastily filled-in area is
magnified. Ms. Lloyd said she was trying to distinguish this
reconstruction from a tidier, more interpretive one presented at the
Pompidou Center in Paris in 1976, but it’s nonetheless a distracting
curatorial choice.
If you are able to look past it, however, you’ll be rewarded with the
rare sensation of floating around inside a Kandinsky — one that merges
the rigid geometry of his Bauhaus period with the wavy lines and
kaleidoscopic clusters of his earlier abstract canvases. It connects the
Gesamtkunstwerk to more contemporary multisensory installation art, and
is as good an excuse as any for yet another Kandinsky show.
“Vasily Kandinsky: From Blaue Reiter to the Bauhaus, 1910-1925” runs
through Feb. 10 at the Neue Galerie New York, 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th
Street; (212)628-6200, neuegaleriedotorgga.
Jules Maeght, right, with Clovis Prévost, left, and the photographer Eric Alexandre at the Maeght Foundation in France.Credit
Jules Maeght Gallery
In
1945 the dealers Aimé and Marguerite Maeght opened the first Galerie
Maeght in Paris with a show of wartime drawings by Henri Matisse. It
soon became a locus for the postwar avant-garde, showing everyone from
Marcel Duchamp to Joan Miró and becoming so successful that, at one time
or another, it had a second Paris branch, and outposts in Barcelona,
New York and Zurich.
The family still runs a print shop and a publishing house for editioned prints, and its museum, the Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation in St. Paul de Vence, France, has been a highlight of the Côte d’Azur since it opened in 1964. As Miró once told The New York Times, Maeght has “a personality that will leave its mark on the artistic world of the 20th century.”
Now
the couple’s grandson, the third-generation dealer Jules Maeght, hopes
to make his mark on San Francisco, too. On Nov. 14, he will open the Jules Maeght Gallery,
in Hayes Valley, a newly fashionable neighborhood that lies just west
of the San Francisco Opera House and Twitter headquarters.
Photo
Work by Mr. Prévost (a photograph documenting “8500 Tons of Iron”), left; and Joan Miró.Credit
From left: Clovis Prévost; Joan Miró/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The
gallery’s inaugural show, “Art in Motion,” will focus on kinetic art —
often described as sculpture that moves, ideally with a machinelike
aesthetic. It will mix the work of European and American masters like
Miró, Wassily Kandinsky and Alexander Calder with that of contemporary
San Franciscans mining a similar vein, like Kal Spelletich, a pioneer of
San Francisco’s machine-art scene.
Organized
by Mr. Maeght and a childhood friend, Natasha Boas, a French-American
curator associated with San Francisco’s so-called Mission School, the
show aims to link the anarchic spirit that once animated Dada and
Surrealism with that of San Francisco’s experimental art scene.
One
reason Mr. Maeght wanted to open with kinetic art was that his family
had embraced it since the beginning. The Paris gallery’s second show,
“Le Surréalisme,” was organized in 1947 by André Breton and Marcel
Duchamp, whose 1913 “Bicycle Wheel,” mounted on a stool, is generally
regarded as the first kinetic artwork, as well as the first ready-made,
an everyday object selected and designated as art. Mr. Maeght said he
saw in the idea “a way to include every kind of media,” from drawings
and videos to performance and installation.
As
for Ms. Boas, who grew up in San Francisco and spent time as a teenager
in the 1980s hanging out with the robot art collective Survival
Research Laboratories, she felt it made perfect sense to showcase “the
very strong relationship between Silicon Valley and San Francisco’s
creative culture,” she said, while “opening up the aesthetic
conversation around motion and kinetics and robotics.”
Underlining
that connection, the gallery itself is housed in a Gough Street
building thought to have once served as a studio for the San Francisco
artist-inventor Rube Goldberg, known for devising wacky contraptions and
machines.
The
heart of the show is the 14-minute film “8500 Tonnes de Fer” (“8500
Tons of Iron”), made in 1971 by two longtime Maeght artists, the Belgian
kinetic sculptor Pol Bury and the French photographer Clovis Prévost.
To create it, they put a 6 1/2-foot-high fun house mirror in the
elevator of the Eiffel Tower: Bury wiggled it as they rode up and down,
while Mr. Prévost filmed the Industrial Revolution marvel reflected in
its surface. This transforms the tower’s carefully calibrated
cross-bracings and arches into mind-bending swirls.
Photo
Work by Pol Bury, left, and Kal Spelletich.Credit
From left: Pol Bury/Artists Rights Society(ARS), New York; Kal Spelletich/Jules Maeght Gallery
“It’s
very much a period film insofar as it’s psychedelic,” Ms. Boas said.
“But there’s also this idea that they’re contorting this technologically
groundbreaking machine with all these optical tricks.” It will be
accompanied by about two dozen photographs by Mr. Prévost that document
the production.
The
show also includes machinelike sculptures by Bury and Miró, represented
here by a 1974 bronze that’s part cannon, part man. Among the other
kinetic “old masters,” as Mr. Maeght calls them, are a 1926 suite of
geometric drawings by Kandinsky and works on paper and a rare standing
mobile from Calder, made in the early 1970s when the sculptor was
spending much of his time in France. (All come from the personal
collections of Mr. Maeght and his father, Adrien; none have been shown
in America before and about half will be for sale.)
Galerie
Maeght in Paris is also sending work by the contemporary British
performance artist Kirstie MacLeod: a video documenting a 2007 event in
which the artist’s glamorous evening gown is gradually nailed to the
floor, rendering her immobile; and photographs of another from 2009 in
which she entangles herself underwater in a hand-woven web and then
fights her way free.
Much
of the San Francisco work is more focused on technology and multimedia.
Marshall Elliott, a recent master’s graduate of the San Francisco Art
Institute, will contribute three constructions that use motorized
elements, as well as light and shadow, to create kinetic installations,
like “Ghost Bike” (2013). A robotic bicycle that circles the gallery
ceaselessly, ringing a bell at each revolution as it traces a ring and
casts shadows on the floor, it suggests a homage to Duchamp.
Also
in the show is work by the Oakland-based artist Tracey Snelling, whose
diorama-like installations of buildings and towns are often brought to
life with lights, sound and video. The largest piece she will show here
is “Bridge,” a 2012 mixed-media assemblage that depicts another
engineering marvel, the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s made with an inkjet
print on wood, but one tower is inset with flickering video footage of
the road, taken from a traveling car, which creates the illusion of
depth and movement.
Then
there is Mr. Spelletich, whom Ms. Boas jokingly calls the “elder
statesman” of the group. In the 1990s he became known for building
interactive fire-breathing robots, made from welded metal and computer
parts; he also helped found bacchanalia like the Nevada arts festival
Burning Man and the annual flash mobs of naughty Santas known as
Santacon. Recently, however, his work has taken a more abstract and
spiritual turn, as in the two small “Locally Euclidean” constructions he
will show here. Made this year from found wood and scrap metal, they
bristle with rough sticks that undulate gently like tree branches when
touched, “triggered by sensors that read your aura,” Mr. Spelletich
said. He calls them “mystical machines.”
But
Mr. Spelletich has something more chaotic in mind for the first night
of the show, where he may bring out what he calls his “more celebratory”
pieces, like his hugging machine or his whiskey-pouring robots.
“They’re always a huge hit,” Mr. Spelletich said. “But I think it’s more
appropriate to build a champagne-sabering robot and honor the French.
So I’m working on that.”
ART REVIEW; Kandinsky and Schoenberg, Seen and Heard on Canvas
By ROBERTA SMITH Published: October 24, 2003
When it comes to ''Schoenberg, Kandinsky and the
Blue Rider'' at the Jewish Museum, we can be grateful on two counts.
First, in a time when recorded music often wafts through museum
exhibitions, the organizers of this show have refrained from making us
listen while we look -- even though they might have claimed every right
to do so. The show examines a historical intersection of art and music:
the friendship between the Viennese Modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg
and the Russian Modernist painter Wassily Kandinsky.
But
fortunately, musical accompaniment has been limited to the Acoustiguide,
which in this case is a valuable aid that I recommend listening to --
at least the musical selections -- with eyes shut. Kandinsky's roiling
paintings, radical in their time, may have lost much of their ability to
shock, assuming a secure place in both the history of art and public
consciousness. But Schoenberg's tumultuous music, like Malevich's
''Black Square,'' remains relatively unassimilated, emblematically
modern. It demands your complete attention and is not about to fade
quietly into any easy-listening background. (A related article appears
on Page 1 of Weekend.)
The second cause for gratitude is that
Schoenberg was himself a painter, a genuine if somewhat capricious
hit-and-miss one. His efforts, usually small and often wan, center on
self-portraits and are variously outsiderish, nearly abstract and
conventionally representational. The last category includes a series of
full-size portraits of friends, which he painted on commission in an
attempt to support himself.
The 36 Schoenberg paintings here
outnumber all else and add a wonderful emotional weight to the visual
firepower of the rest of the show: 13 paintings by Kandinsky, as well as
12 by other members of the German Expressionist Blue Rider (Blaue
Reiter) group, which flourished briefly just before the First World War
-- among them Franz Marc, Alexi von Jawlensky, August Macke, Albert
Bloch and Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky's companion. Flitting in and out
among more professional, fully committed visual statements, Schoenberg's
images both disrupt and pull together the exhibition's visual narrative
in an essential way.
This exhibition, organized by Fred Wasserman, the
museum's associate curator, and Esther da Costa Meyer, an art historian
at Princeton, concentrates on a thin slice of history to the exclusion
of much -- maybe too much -- else; but it is a relatively unexamined
slice, centering on two giants in the history of Modernism. Their
sensibilities crossed paths in January 1911, when Kandinsky heard
Schoenberg's controversial atonal music for the first time at a concert
in Munich. Inspired, he painted ''Impression III (Concert),'' now in the
collection of the Lenbachhaus in Munich.
This work, at the
beginning of the show, is visiting the United States for the first time.
In this context, at least, the grand piano and the attentive audience
that the painting loosely depicts are startlingly recognizable, but it
is still an unusually raw, unfussy work for Kandinsky.
Mainly
through letters, the painter and the composer established an immediate
rapport as kindred Modernist soul mates. Probably taking a swipe at
Cubism, Kandinsky wrote, ''Our own modern harmony is not to be found in
the 'geometric' but rather in the anti-geometric, anti-logical way''
based on ''dissonances.''
Responding, Schoenberg located their
common ground ''in what you call the 'unlogical' and I call the
'elimination of the conscious will in art.' '' Both were trying to move
beyond traditional composition to works that put their audiences in a
kind of free fall, where nothing could be taken for granted.
They
saw and professed to like each other's paintings. By the fall of 1911,
Kandinsky and Marc were planning to include Schoenberg's scores in the
first and only Blue Rider Almanac -- a publication surveying modern,
folk and children's art -- along with scores by other Viennese composers
in Schoenberg's circle, like Alban Berg and Anton Webern. But in
December, the supposedly forward-looking NKVM (Modern Artists Society of
Munich), barely two years old, rejected Kandinsky's submission to its
annual show. The Blue Rider Almanac was hastily upgraded to an
exhibition. Its 48 works by 14 artists included 4 paintings by
Schoenberg.
The centerpiece of the Jewish Museum's show is a big
gallery devoted to that Blue Rider exhibition. Excepting a blazing
little Münter landscape, the high point of the gallery display is
Kandinsky's ''Sketch for Composition V'' (1911), the work rejected by
the NKVM and on loan here from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.
With
black whiplash lines and its landscape forms riled to the point of
dynamic near-abstraction, this work is noticeably more liberated than
the pre-Schoenberg Kandinskys, which are hung in a preceding gallery,
although the color is more muted. The earlier works are full of chunks
of jewel-like color and hints of fairy tale landscapes, figures and
horseback riders; they reflect the artist's infatuation with Persian
miniatures and Russian folk art. Hints of figures would remain in
Kandinsky's paintings until the 1920's, by which point his friendship
with Schoenberg was mostly over. Paradoxically, it is these late works,
with their crystalline geometric shapes and almost scorelike
compositions, that seem closest to painted music.
The sharp focus of this exhibition may distort
the importance of Schoenberg's music to Kandinsky's development. After
all, it was part of an intellectual and emotional support system that
included Marc, Münter and their work, as well as the cultural
environment of Munich, where Kandinsky had lived since 1896. But for
purely competitive reasons, artists can often feel emotionally closest
to artists working in other mediums, and other cities. It can't have
hurt their relationship that Schoenberg had made nearly all his
paintings by 1911, the year they met.
Occupying two small
galleries at the Jewish Museum, Schoenberg's paintings move in and out
of Kandinsky and company's push for Modernism like a double agent --
moving ahead, then dallying behind, and either way providing both
emotional and comic relief. (One image, a caustic caricature titled
''Critic,'' shows a bearded, slightly Mesopotamian face, with huge black
ears.)
They make explicit the Expressionism that lurks within
both Schoenberg's discordant but highly structured music and Kandinsky's
more intuitive free-form paintings, revealing a basic primitive force
that assumes a tamer but still essential form in the works that earned
the two men their places in history.
Many of his self-portraits
underscore Schoenberg's vision of the suffering artist pilloried by a
philistine society with a maudlin, indulgent crudeness that rarely
appears in his music. Yet other works feel strikingly advanced, and more
accessible than his music. In one, a large, goofy hand reaches down to
grasp a balding head -- Schoenberg's -- that features a single enormous
eye staring straight into the ground. The work is pure Philip Guston.
In the most astounding images, the face is
reduced to a floating eye or two embedded in pale, gently shaded
monochrome grounds. Even better is a small, pale gold square, titled
''Thinking''; it seems completely abstract, until you realize that the
curving mound of pink and dark brush strokes obtruding into the painting
from the bottom edge is undoubtedly Schoenberg's own shiny pate.
Looking somewhat like a painting by the midcentury American outsider
Forrest Bess, it zeroes in on the composer's pulsing brain.
It is
interesting to remember that Kandinsky's favorite paintings by
Schoenberg were the more conventional, full-faced self-portraits, rather
than these pared-down, flayed little images. You wonder if Kandinsky
ever suspected that Schoenberg's maverick paintings might be every bit
as daring as his own.
''Schoenberg, Kandinsky and the Blue Rider''
is at the Jewish Museum, Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3200,
through Feb. 12.
Photo: A detail from Kandinsky's study
''Watercolor With Red Spot.'' (Photo by $; 2003 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris)
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN Published: September 25, 1992
"THE GREAT UTOPIA," the survey of Russian and
Soviet avant-garde art opening today at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, intends to overwhelm the viewer, and unfortunately it does. With
more than 800 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, textiles,
ceramics, furniture and architectural models, occupying almost the
entirety of the newly renovated building, it must surely be, as the
museum boasts, the largest show in the history of the Guggenheim. At
least, it feels that way.
One retreats from it like Napoleon from
Moscow, bedraggled and confused. It includes compelling works, many of
which have been extracted for the first time from provincial Russian
museums, where these objects languished for the better part of this
century because of the indifference, if not outright hostility, of the
Soviet authorities. Yet the impact of the many remarkable things on view
is hopelessly diluted by the exhibition's sheer size, seesawing
quality, and its gimmicky and self-indulgent installation.
The
opposite impression is made by a related display of Marc Chagall's 1920
murals for the Jewish Theater in Moscow at the Guggenheim's SoHo outlet.
A small show of what may well be the artist's crowning achievement, a
suite of delicate, witty, fanciful paintings, accompanied by text panels
that put them in a clear context, it is precisely what "The Great
Utopia" is not: a focused, manageable, lucid presentation.
The
period under review in "The Great Utopia" encompasses the years 1915,
when Suprematism was introduced to the Russian public in the exhibition
called "0.10," through 1932, when Stalin prepared to bring artistic
experimentation in his country to a violent and irrefutable end. The
principal figures of those years, including Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir
Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova and Aleksandr
Rodchenko, have long been known in the West; and especially during the
last several years, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
opening up of its archives, the works of these artists have been
frequently and widely exhibited.
But these works form only part of a far larger,
and more complex, story; the avant-garde included numerous adherents who
divided themselves among competing factions, which today can be hard to
distinguish visually and which the exhibition, although it includes
dozens of lesser-known artists, does an inadequate job of sorting out
and defining.
The show does make all too apparent, with so many
similar works in gallery after gallery, that the avant-garde could be as
doctrinaire and authoritarian as the old guard against which it was
reacting. Change, yes, but only within the boundaries established by the
new artistic leadership. Chagall was driven from his post as commissar
of art in the city of Vitebsk by the Suprematists. And not long after
Wassily Kandinsky organized an institute in Moscow for the study of art,
he was also run out of town, by the Constructivists who considered his
paintings too subjective, too spiritualistic. A very beautiful group of
Kandinskys, with their soft, swimming, brilliantly colored shapes --
like Suprematist paintings submerged in water -- stand out in this
context for their unmistakable and inspiring individuality.
It was
not on the individual but rather on the multitude that the
avant-gardists concentrated their energies. Yet they failed to win over
the Soviet masses, and despite their claims to the contrary, remained an
elite. Even the marvelous geometric designs for textiles that artists
like Popova and Stepanova conceived as symbols of the new classless
society, to replace the old floral prints, found few takers. Likewise,
it was partly in response to the public's attachment to realism that
many artists by the early 1920's had abandoned abstraction and returned
to figuration. The story of the avant-garde may be one of tremendous
creativity, intense energy and lofty aspirations, but it is also one of
misguided ideas and contradictory impulses.
"The Great Utopia" is
at its best when it does not merely celebrate the avant-garde or rehash
the standard events, like "0.10" or the later "5 x 5 = 25" exhibition,
but instead when it points up the unsteadiness and factionalism of the
era. The last part of the show, particularly the final gallery with its
figurative works, is the most remarkable because it is the least
familiar, even though, like the rest of the exhibition, it is in serious
need of trimming. To see the crisp, dark, brutal works of Aleksandr
Deineka, the George Grosz-like watercolors of Yuri Pimenov, and even the
pathetically painted fantasies of Aleksandr Tyshler is to get a broader
feel for the period than is typically served up.
There are other
highlights in the show. One of them is the work of Lev Yudin, whose
Cubist canvases and drawings are remarkably subtle and alive. Another is
the work of Pavel Filonov, the best of whose crystalline compositions,
derived from nature, are seemingly illuminated by an inner light. They
are interestingly juxtaposed with the later figurative paintings of
Malevich, with which they share a certain otherworldliness and spiritual
intensity.
The section on photography is memorable for its
description of the conflict between the so-called October group, which
favored fragmentary, disorienting images, and the Revolutionary Society
of Proletarian Photographers, whose more straightforward pictures
conformed to the realist tastes of the Soviet rulers. The photographs of
El Lissitzky, and especially those of Boris Ignatovich, with their
vertiginous views of Leningrad harbor, seem to capture perfectly the
avant-garde's idea of a world of dynamic forms and rhythms.
Still,
these are isolated works in an exhibition that overall fails to hang
together. A team of 14 not always like-minded curators from three
countries put together "The Great Utopia," and it shows. There is no
clear unifying vision or purpose, no obvious reason why yet another
examination of the subject was necessary. The event seems ultimately to
be about nothing so much as its own intimidating size and the museum's
diplomatic wheeling and dealing in obtaining lots of obscure works from
lots of obscure places. The installation by Zaha Hadid, a kind of
avant-garde theme park, is clever in the single case of a red
zig-zagging wall that divides part of the museum ramp, but otherwise
underscores the impression of superficiality. Time after time, as when
Rodchenko's black-on-black paintings are hung on black walls, the design
vies for attention with the art.
The show's grandiosity and its
insensitivity to what is on view inevitably reinforce persistent doubts
about the Guggenheim's direction. Once more, the notoriously overcrowded
and underedited survey of contemporary German paintings, organized
several years ago at the museum, comes to mind.
The Chagall
exhibition suggests something else. It not only highlights the murals
but also tells in extensive text panels about the Jewish Theater itself,
which in the early years after the Revolution thrived under Government
support as a place of raucous comedy and political satire.
Chagall's blend of Jewish imagery and modernist
forms, influenced as they were by Cubism, is nowhere more sensitively
and intricately realized than in these paintings. They are complemented
by a room of preparatory sketches and other works, including later
canvases done in Paris, which demonstrate how much his art, despite its
lightheartedness, dealt in cultural memory and loss.
Between this
modest show and "The Great Utopia," there is surely a satisfying middle
ground for ambitious exhibitions. The Guggenheim has yet to find it.
"The
Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932," remains
at the Guggenheim Museum, 88th Street and Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side,
through Dec. 15. The show is supported by Lufthansa. Chagall's
murals for the Jewish Theater remain at the SoHo Guggenheim, 575
Broadway, at Prince Street, through Jan. 17.
Photos: A 1932
lithograph, "The Victory of Socialism in Our Country Is Guaranteed," by
Gustav Klutsis, at the Guggenheim Museum.; Detail from one of Chagall's
1920 murals for the Jewish Theater in Moscow, at the Guggenheim in SoHo.
(1992 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)
"Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most
difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a
heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a
true poet. This last is essential."
WASSILY KANDINSKY SYNOPSIS
One of the pioneers of abstract modern art, Wassily Kandinsky exploited
the evocative interrelation between color and form to create an
aesthetic experience that engaged the sight, sound, and emotions of the
public. He believed that total abstraction offered the possibility for
profound, transcendental expression and that copying from nature only
interfered with this process. Highly inspired to create art that
communicated a universal sense of spirituality, he innovated a pictorial
language that only loosely related to the outside world, but expressed
volumes about the artist's inner experience. His visual vocabulary
developed through three phases, shifting from his early, representative
canvases and their divine symbolism to his rapturous and operatic
compositions, to his late, geometric and biomorphic flat planes of
color. Kandinsky's art and ideas inspired many generations of artists,
from his students at the Bauhaus to the Abstract Expressionists after World War II.
WASSILY KANDINSKY KEY IDEAS
Painting was, above all, deeply spiritual for Kandinsky. He sought to
convey profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a
universal visual language of abstract forms and colors that transcended
cultural and physical boundaries.
Kandinsky viewed non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode
to express the "inner necessity" of the artist and to convey universal
human emotions and ideas. He viewed himself as a prophet whose mission
was to share this ideal with the world for the betterment of society.
Kandinsky viewed music as the most transcendent form of non-objective
art - musicians could evoke images in listeners' minds merely with
sounds. He strove to produce similarly object-free, spiritually rich
paintings that alluded to sounds and emotions through a unity of
sensation.
Artwork Description & Analysis: This breakthrough
work is a deceptively simple image - a lone rider racing across a
landscape - yet it represented a decisive moment in Kandinsky's
developing style. In this painting, he demonstrated a clear stylistic
link to the work of the Impressionists, like Claude Monet, particularly
evident in the contrasts of light and dark on the sun-dappled hillside.
The ambiguity of the form of the figure on horseback rendered in a
variety of colors that almost blend together foreshadow his interest in
abstraction. The theme of the horse and rider reappeared in many of his
later works. For Kandinsky this motif signified his resistance against
conventional aesthetic values as well as the possibilities for a purer,
more spiritual life through art.
Oil on canvas - Private collection
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WASSILY KANDINSKY BIOGRAPHY
Childhood
Wassily (Vasily) Wassilyevich Kandinsky was born in 1866 in Moscow to
well educated, upper-class parents of mixed ethnic origins. His father
was born close to Mongolia, while his mother was a Muscovite, and his
grandmother was from the German-speaking Baltic. The bulk of Kandinsky's
childhood was spent in Odessa, a thriving, cosmopolitan city populated
by Western Europeans, Mediterraneans, and a variety of other ethnic
groups. At an early age, Kandinsky exhibited an extraordinary
sensitivity toward the stimuli of sounds, words, and colors. His father
encouraged his unique and precocious gift for the arts and enrolled him
in private drawing classes, as well as piano and cello lessons. Despite
early exposure to the arts, Kandinsky did not turn to painting until he
reached the age of 30. Instead, he entered the University of Moscow in
1886 to study law, ethnography, and economics. In spite of the legal
focus of his academic pursuits, Kandinsky's interest in color symbolism
and its effect on the human psyche grew throughout his time in Moscow.
In particular, an ethnographic research trip in 1889 to the region of
Vologda, in northwest Russia, sparked an interest in folk art that
Kandinsky carried with him throughout his career. After completing his
degree in 1892, he started his career in law education by lecturing at
the university.
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WASSILY KANDINSKY LEGACY
Kandinsky's work, both artistic and theoretical, played a large role in
the philosophic foundation for later modern movements, in particular
Abstract Expressionism and its variants like Color Field painting. His
late, biomorphic work had a large influence on Arshile Gorky's development of a non-objective style, which in turn helped to shape the New York School's aesthetic. Jackson Pollock
was interested in Kandinsky's late paintings and was fascinated by his
theories about the expressive possibilities of art, in particular, his
emphasis on spontaneous activity and the subconscious. Kandinsky's
analysis of the sensorial properties of color was immensely influential
on the Color Field painters, like Mark Rothko, who emphasized the interrelationships of hues for their emotive potential. Even the 1980s artists working in the Neo-Expressionist resurgence in painting, like Julian Schnabel and Philip Guston,
applied his ideas regarding the artist's inner expression on the canvas
to their postmodern work. Kandinsky set the stage for much of the
expressive modern art produced in the twentieth century.
"Colour is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with
its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that
key, sets the soul vibrating automatically."
"The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious,
enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it
acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent
subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real
existence of being."
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Kandinsky at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Website for the 2009 Kandinsky retrospective, with in-depth information on the artist, his work, and his career
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