"Kandinsky' at the Guggenheim in N.Y. (2nd review)

Seldom is a major art institution as deeply associated with the work of a single artist as New York's Guggenheim Museum is with Vassily Kandinsky, the Russian master generally credited as the first painter to take the full plunge into pictorial abstraction.

In 1929, the year the Museum of Modern Art opened in New York, Hilla von Rebay— an artist of some consequence herself— urged Solomon Guggenheim to collect Kandinsky. Ten years later, the Kandinskys would form the core of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting that Guggenheim and Rebay opened in Manhattan, and it was here that Kandinsky's memorial exhibit, consisting of nearly 300 works, was held in 1945. By that time, Frank Lloyd Wright had been commissioned to design what would become the Guggenheim itself, whose 50th anniversary the present show, simply entitled "Kandinsky," commemorates.

You could make a case for Kandinsky (1866-1944) as the artist of the 20th Century, and Kandinsky, never very modest about his work, probably wouldn't object. Born to well-to-do parents, he was off on a conventional career after studying law and economics when two things stopped him: an exhibit of one of Monet's haystack paintings, and a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin. Painting was the medium that absorbed him, although music formed the vital background to Kandinsky's experiments, and a hearing of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet was to galvanize his movement toward abstraction.

Freud, Proust and the Cubists

It's hard now to grasp the sense of intellectual cross-fertilization that prevailed among the arts and between the arts and sciences in the generation that produced the Fauves, the Cubists and the Expressionists in painting; atonality and serialism in music; the rupture of narrative in Proust, Musil and Joyce; Freudian psychoanalysis; and quantum and relativity theory in physics. Kandinsky was preternaturally alert to these developments, and he was intimately associated with some of the foremost movements of modern painting, including the Blaue Reiter school in Munich, Russian Constructivism and Suprematism, the Bauhaus and, in his last decade in Paris, Surrealism. All these movements influenced him, but none defined him.

The 20th Century's political turmoil also left its mark on Kandinsky, and his art takes on a heroic quality not only for its boldness and originality, but also for the circumstances under which he produced it. As a Russian national, he was forcibly expelled from Germany with the outbreak of war in 1914, and then faced with the confiscation of his family's property after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Returning to Germany in 1921, he obtained a coveted Weimar passport, only to flee Hitler for Paris in 1933 and (by this time in his mid-70s) to face Nazi conquest and occupation seven years later. An offer of refuge in America came, but Kandinsky, whose works had featured prominently in Hitler's notorious "Degenerate" art exhibit in 1937, stuck it out in France despite privation, illness and the fear of internment or worse.

Unbroken by Hitler

Picasso's wartime work in occupied Paris bears the scars of its period, but Kandinsky's late art retained a noble and rarely broken serenity, although Isolation (1944), a work shown several years ago at Manhattan's Helly Nahmad Gallery (although not included in the present show), provides a striking sense of what he endured.

Serenity isn't a quality one associates with the Kandinsky of the breakthrough pre-war years in Munich, when he was forging a new expressive language doggedly independent of Cubism. As one work succeeds another, one is left with a sense of excited, tumultuous discovery— a sense perhaps not dissimilar to that which Schoenberg, whom Kandinsky had befriended, must have experienced as he felt his way beyond post-Wagnerian chromaticism into atonality. Indeed, the two men were to pursue intriguingly parallel paths.

Schoenberg, in ultimately anchoring himself to serialism, forged a new compositional system as rigorous as classical tonality had ever been. Kandinsky, after his own voyage into the uncharted waters of nonobjective art, was to embrace a new formalism of his own in the 1920s, with simple geometric forms replacing the dreamlike drifts and daubs of his earliest abstract works. The influence of Bauhaus art, and particularly of his colleague and friend Paul Klee, is evident here, as is the partial rapprochement with Cubism represented by geometric figuration.

Whistling Schoenberg?

In retrospect, one may wonder of Kandinsky, as one does of Schoenberg, whether the old expressive world of their youth had ever been truly left behind. Schoenberg once predicted, perhaps a bit wistfully, that his 12-tone themes would eventually be whistled in the street like any popular tune. Kandinsky's abstract canvases, even at their seemingly most disaggregated, echo where they do not, perhaps, deliberately evoke representational forms.

Painting with a Black Arch (1912) is, according to the Guggenheim's giveaway brochure, "devoid of representational imagery"; but isn't that a schematic bird in the lower right-hand corner, and isn't the black arch itself, which in Kandinsky's esoteric vocabulary signifies silence, also an alp? It may be, in Wallace Stevens's suggestive phrase, the "alp at the end of the mind"— a world embraced and reemitted by mind— but never one in which natural forms are entirely abandoned.

Acid-trippers

Indeed, what's most exhilarating about Kandinsky's early abstractions is the sense of interaction between mind and world once the censoring filters of conventional consciousness are stripped away. Psychotropic drugs could remove those filters too, but without the same payoff. There would be, in due course, millions of acid-trippers; but there is still only one Kandinsky— and, as the preliminary sketches for his major works show, he made his paintings the old-fashioned way: He searched hard for balance and structure, even while using the most apparently improvisational materials.

Some critics regard the hard-edge geometric abstractions of Kandinsky's Bauhaus period— which often play off the more sweeping, gestural elements of his earlier style— as a letdown. But, for me, the tension and severity in them is no less aesthetically satisfying. The artist's inner eye here is more on cosmology than landscape, and some of this work (White Center, Several Circles, etc.) anticipates the imagery made familiar to us by the probes of the Hubble telescope.

Space is more playfully although no less dynamically used in the late Paris paintings, whose biomorphic forms suggest a return to earth, and bring Kandinsky's project as it were full circle.

Life on the edge

Kandinsky's world was rigorously self-absorbed. In Russia during World War I and in Paris during World War II he lived precariously, and was sometimes short of painting materials (he drew and did watercolors instead). He survived the loss of a child, the confiscation of his estate, and forced exile. He saw the Blaue Reiter dispersed by war, the Bauhaus closed, and his own work subjected to ridicule by history's most sinister tyrant. In his last years, Kandinsky lived at Hitler's sufferance.

Others affected by these or related events— Picasso, Beckmann, Dix, Grosz, Gonzalez and even to a degree Klee and Miro— reflected them in their works. But it is hard to find any decipherable mark of them in Kandinsky.

I mentioned Kandinsky's very late Isolation; from the present show, I might add two works. Development in Brown (1933), a canvas that evokes not only Soviet-style Constructivism but, in its central panel, Duchamps's Nude Descending a Staircase, seems as well to reference the Nazi takeover of Germany (brown, of course, was the Nazi color); while a dark-hued watercolor from the same year, Gloomy Situation, seems to wear its politics on its sleeve.

It's the sort of title Klee might give to one of his compositions, but that Kandinsky otherwise eschewed in favor of purely descriptive ones: Dominant Curve, Delicate Tensions, Various Actions, and so forth. Kandinsky could use the language of a religious mystic or prophet when writing about art, but his own paintings were required to speak for themselves. Almost without exception, they do.

Fighting against gravity

The Guggenheim's exhibit draws upon its own large holdings, including a gallery devoted to work in ink, watercolor and gouache that could well have constituted a show in itself, with borrowings from two other major repositories, the Centre Pompidou and the Städtdische Galerie in Munich. It's surprising to see none of the nine Compositions with which Kandinsky's plunge into abstraction is most famously associated, but the four 1914 panels he executed for the American collector Edwin R. Campbell, never before shown as an ensemble, render partial compensation.

Also odd is the fact that the show begins with Kandinsky's last decade and works backward as one descends. You can make the reverse passage against Frank Lloyd Wright's always infuriating ramp, but you're fighting gravity, and the show won't make much better sense anyway. Still, while (as readers may know) I am not fond of blockbuster exhibits in general, I would be hard pressed to wish less of what I saw. Greatness does not pall.♦


To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.