Page 57 - Contemporary Art and Old Masters

Vasily Kandinsky,
Painting with White Border (Bild mit weißem Rand), May 1913. Oil
on canvas, 55 1/4 × 78 7/8 inches (140.3 × 200.3 cm). Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding
Collection, By gift 37.245

again, the artist’s stylistic evolution was intimately tied to themes of regeneration and metamorphosis.
his sense of place and his meaningful intersections with Arranged on the fourth level, works from his decade at
artists, musicians, poets, and other cultural producers who the Bauhaus, a German school of applied art and design,
shared his transnational vision and experimental bent. manifest Kandinsky’s conviction that art could transform
Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle portrays how, in seeking self and society. This body of work reflects the revitalization
to free art from its ties to nature and representation, of his abstract style following his renewed contact with the
Kandinsky remained committed to exploring a subject Russian avant-garde in the late 1910s.
matter based on what he called the artist’s “inner
necessity.” Persistent themes - from memory and identity to The artist increasingly adopted geometric motifs, and in
sensorial experience and spirituality - are traced in the work of particular the circle, as a vehicle for his emotive language.
an artist whose theories and works continue to resonate today. The final section of the exhibition, positioned towards
the apex of the rotunda, examines Kandinsky’s earliest
Kandinsky’s groundbreaking career unfolds in paintings, made while he was living in or around Munich.
chronologically reverse order proceeding upwards along There he participated in heightened vanguard activity
the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp. The exhibition begins with across multiple disciplines. In time the artist interrogated
the artist’s final chapter, set in France, when the natural the expressive possibilities of color, line, and form, inspired
sciences and Surrealism, as well as an abiding interest in part by contemporary music. At every turn Kandinsky
in Russian and Siberian cultural practices and folklore, responded to his environment and developed new ways to
informed his biomorphic imagery and prompted recurrent probe the spiritual in art.

WORLD of ART 57