Kandinsky at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on artrepublic.com

This comprehensive survey comprising nearly 100 of Kandinsky’s mostimportant canvases from 1902 to 1942 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.

Complemented by more than 60 works on paper from the collections of the Guggenheim and Hilla von Rebay foundations, this retrospective traces the painter’s oeuvre, focusing on the key events that informed his life and work. Marked by two world wars and the Russian revolutions, Kandinsky’s abstraction did not develop in detachment or isolation. 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 1980s, reveals the complex background to his aesthetic innovations.

The exhibition 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 re-examination of the geographical- and time-based periods traditionally applied to his oeuvre.

Kandinsky 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 museum’s founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim, started acquiring works by Kandinsky in 1929 upon the counsel of 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 asnonobjective 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. 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.

OPENING HOURS: Sun- Wed, & Fri: 10.00 -17.45, Sat: 10.00 - 19.45

Image Credits:

Vasily Kandinsky, Sketch for Composition II (Skizze für Komposition II), 1909–10, Oil on canvas, 38 3/8 x 51 5/8 inches (97.5 x 131.2 cm), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection. 45.961

Vasily Kandinsky, In the Black Square (Im schwarzen Viereck), June 1923, Oil on canvas, 38 3/8 x 36 5/8 inches (97.5 x 93 cm), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift. 37.254

Vasily Kandinsky, Dominant Curve (Courbe dominante), April 1936, Oil on canvas, 50 7/8 x 76 1/2 inches (129.4 x 194.2 cm), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection. 45.989