The Guggenheim in New York is having a Kandinsky exhibition, something that occurs “like clockwork every 20 years or so,” according to Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Well, at least I’ll have a backup plan if I can’t magick up a reason to be in the vicinity between now and 13 January. Yet this exhibition sounds extra luscious.
Kandinsky is the “foundational artist” of the Guggenheim. As Picasso and Matisse are to MoMA, so Kandinsky is to the Guggenheim. But it goes further in the case of the Guggenheim. Because the architect was directly influenced by the artist, Smith suggests. Though Frank Lloyd Wright “denied the connection,” he was chosen by Hilla Rebay, the museum’s founding director, and “she had Kandinsky on the brain.” Surely, the resulting structure cannot have been merely a happy accident:
Kandinsky’s precarious, ever-moving compositions suggest that he never met a diagonal he didn’t like; Wright obliged with a museum on a perpetual tilt.
The sweet fitness of artist and architecture has allowed something special to be created in the hanging of the current exhibition:
[The exhibition] distills Kandinsky’s momentous career to about 100 paintings … The canvases and almost nothing else fill Wright’s great rotunda from bottom to top, sometimes at the magisterial rate of one painting per bay.
Doesn’t this sound wonderful? Especially for an artist as spendthrift as Kandinsky. For in so many of his works, there’s a lavishness, a redundancy of idea and colour, that packed together might prove overwhelming. As Smith notes, each painting is “a brave new crowded world in free fall, full of more forms, colours and agitation that any single painting needs.” However, revealed as they are in the current exhibition, bay by bay, I imagine one can appreciate the generosity of all this. Plus, its courageous recklessness.
The other thing that sets Kandinsky apart is his eschewing of the distinction between abstraction and representation. It’s a distinction that’s always been “shaky at best,” Smith notes. Yet Kandinsky was blithely ignoring it long before the post-structuralist philosophers like Derrida canvassed the problems of representation. It also contributes to his lack of interest in resolution. “He never painted a perfect picture,” Smith says. Rather, he was interested in “transformation,” in trying to “catch art’s transformative powers in the act.”
A glorious spendthrift of an artist, uninterested in perfection, resolution and academic distinctions, showing in one of the world’s most distinctive art museums: what a treat! If you’re passing, please give him my regards.
To read Roberta Smith’s article, click here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/arts/design/18kandinsky.html?th&emc=th
To listen to an audio version, click here:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/09/18/arts/design/20090918-kandinsky-audioss/index.html
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Images: Kandinsky, Black Lines 1913 (top); Sketch for Composition II 1909-10 (bottom)
Kandinsky is special. Thank you.
You’re welcome. Cheers.