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Kandinsky is Coming

July 28, 2009 by Marion Maneker

Wassily Kandinsky, Lyrical (1911)The Financial Times‘s Jackie Wullschlager reviews the Wassily Kandinsky show at the Pompidou that will travel to New York’s Guggenheim:

When the first Monets arrived in Russia in 1896, those flocking to see them included a 30-year-old Moscow lawyer, who stood transfixed by the “Haystacks”. Wassily Kandinsky perceived at once that the series pointed to the abstraction of colour and form as painting’s future; in response, he quit law and became an art student with big ambitions. “If fate grants me sufficient time, I shall discover a new international language that will be eternal, and will develop infinitely and is not called Esperanto. It is called ‘painting’,” he announced. “Everything done so far is just copying.” […]

The retrospective now at Paris’s Pompidou Centre includes many choice works demonstrating how, from the start, Kandinsky painted hazily defined forms in flat saturated blocks of colour: sunflower and cherry-magenta trees flanking “The Blue Mountain”; a scarlet-orange sun burning within a white glacier in “Romantic Landscape”. The chromatic range and intensity is exhilarating: too often, when grouped together, Kandinsky’s attempts to turn symbols into a universal language churn into worthy painterly Esperanto.

The triumph of this exhibition – organised with Munich’s Lenbachhaus and New York’s Guggenheim – is to showcase Kandinsky’s works not narrowly as a progress to abstraction but as variations on a theme as the artist responded to shifting political, social, personal realities, especially life as a triple exile. The largest ever exhibition of his oeuvre, and including most of his best works as well as revelatory studies on paper, it is a humanly appealing interpretation of this cerebral yet romantic artist.

Wassily Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou (Financial Times)

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