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An amusing guest who stayed too long at the party
"Kandinsky' at the Guggenheim in N.Y. (1st review)
"Generally speaking, colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key to another, to cause vibrations in the soul."
—Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
The spiral rotundas of New York's Guggenheim Museum have been given over to a vast retrospective of the art of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), one of the founding fathers of abstract art—although even as I write this, I suspect that Kandinsky would vigorously decline that honor. His art is not so much abstract as it is other-directed. It's about capturing the music of the soul.
Visually, Kandinsky art begins as a traditional affair, influenced by the forms of art nouveau and the content of Symbolism. His early painting of two lovers riding is as lovely as a stained glass window— which it somewhat resembles. He then goes through an Expressionist/Fauvist phase—which I found sadly under-represented in this show.
Visual music
Hitting his stride, just before and during World War I Kandinsky creates a series of dazzling works that attempt to create visual music. In canvases filled with mountains, towers and leaping horses (the famous "Blue Rider" school took its name from a Kandinsky painting), he creates a fairy-tale world in which the pictorial niceties of his earlier works are replaced by a bold shorthand vocabulary of color and line.
He thinks he's doing something new— and he is. These paintings must have seemed so off-the-wall to traditional audiences of 1912 that it's hard for us today— when these works have become revered icons— to realize just how astonishing (and not necessarily in a good sense of the word) their audiences must have found them.
In a way, Kandinsky was like an amusing guest who stayed at the party too long. When you're looking at hundreds of his works, sensory overload sets in. One "Three Stooges" short may be entertaining— but six and a half hours of them?
"'He lost me'
Complicating the matter is the fact that Kandinsky's art changed after World War I, becoming harsher, losing its lovely sense of lyricism— and the energy that accompanied it. The later works— arrangements of sharply-outlined shapes with bold, often jarring colors— take some getting used to, and there were too many of them for the show's own good. I heard dozens of people saying that the artist "lost me" at this point.
Not that Kandinsky's ideas changed. For him, a triangle was never just a triangle, rather, it was "the life of the spirit." Unfortunately, for too many of us, by this point it was time to call for the Ghostbusters.♦
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read a response, click here.
—Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
The spiral rotundas of New York's Guggenheim Museum have been given over to a vast retrospective of the art of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), one of the founding fathers of abstract art—although even as I write this, I suspect that Kandinsky would vigorously decline that honor. His art is not so much abstract as it is other-directed. It's about capturing the music of the soul.
Visually, Kandinsky art begins as a traditional affair, influenced by the forms of art nouveau and the content of Symbolism. His early painting of two lovers riding is as lovely as a stained glass window— which it somewhat resembles. He then goes through an Expressionist/Fauvist phase—which I found sadly under-represented in this show.
Visual music
Hitting his stride, just before and during World War I Kandinsky creates a series of dazzling works that attempt to create visual music. In canvases filled with mountains, towers and leaping horses (the famous "Blue Rider" school took its name from a Kandinsky painting), he creates a fairy-tale world in which the pictorial niceties of his earlier works are replaced by a bold shorthand vocabulary of color and line.
He thinks he's doing something new— and he is. These paintings must have seemed so off-the-wall to traditional audiences of 1912 that it's hard for us today— when these works have become revered icons— to realize just how astonishing (and not necessarily in a good sense of the word) their audiences must have found them.
In a way, Kandinsky was like an amusing guest who stayed at the party too long. When you're looking at hundreds of his works, sensory overload sets in. One "Three Stooges" short may be entertaining— but six and a half hours of them?
"'He lost me'
Complicating the matter is the fact that Kandinsky's art changed after World War I, becoming harsher, losing its lovely sense of lyricism— and the energy that accompanied it. The later works— arrangements of sharply-outlined shapes with bold, often jarring colors— take some getting used to, and there were too many of them for the show's own good. I heard dozens of people saying that the artist "lost me" at this point.
Not that Kandinsky's ideas changed. For him, a triangle was never just a triangle, rather, it was "the life of the spirit." Unfortunately, for too many of us, by this point it was time to call for the Ghostbusters.♦
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read a response, click here.
What, When, Where
“Kandinsky.†Through January 13, 2009 at Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Ave. (at 89th Street), New York. (212) 423-3500 or www.guggenheim.org/new-york.
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