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The way Kandinsky is displayed–in a generous, spacious style moving chronologically up the Guggenheim’s atrium ramp–the dazzling development of his various periods comes into sharp focus. This has the added effect of making his last pieces–lesser-known canvases dating from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s–seem like the ultimate goal of a four decades-long artistic journey. That impression is misleading, yet somewhat appropriate: the show’s last ten paintings are its greatest revelation. Living and painting in a Parisian suburb for the last eleven years of his life, Kandinsky toned down his trademark primary colors in favor of a pastel palette, tightened his compositions into highly regimented spaces (often organized by grid-like structures) and populated his works with small, self-contained anthropomorphic figures. In canvases like “Thirty” (1937, above) and “Sky Blue” (1940) these actors on his stripped, minimalist stages resemble small critters and insects, elsewhere the lettering or musical notation of some foreign nation. While his earlier and best-known works evoke emotional extremes with saturated colors and vibrant brushstrokes, the cool control and meticulous, manicured forms in these late masterpieces are like painterly science experiments.

Finishing with those last works can be misleading, though, as they suggest that the end of Kandinsky’s life coincided with the culmination of his artistic development. Meanwhile, his best known works date from 20 years earlier and one could argue that his most formally accomplished period came during his tenure at the Bauhaus–though he produced significantly fewer works in those years. It’s well worth going through Kandinsky from both the top down and the bottom up to appreciate the great variety of evolutions in his work, rather than focusing on one movement.


The pieces brought together for this exhibition–mostly from the Guggenheim, Paris’s Centre Pompidou and Munich’s Städtische Galerie, the three institutions where the exhibition has been presented–have the advantage of showcasing all Kandinsky’s phases and not prioritizing one over the others. This expository curatorial style lets more obscure pieces breathe whereas they’re often left as footnotes to Kandinsky’s best known works. In two paintings from winter 1913, for instance, he does away with strong black outlines and gestural brushstrokes to compose a set of circular color splotches scrawled with black marks. The effect reminds of Raoul Dufy, but fits awkwardly and intriguingly into the chronology of Kandinsky’s work. The gray-dominated postwar pieces are also a stunning revelation and one in particular, “In Gray” (1919, above), with its violently disjointed and abstracted cityscape, is nearly as violent and moving an indictment of war as Picasso’s “Guernica.” Beyond being an oft-referenced developer of expressionism, Kandinsky’s multitudinous succession of styles touched upon virtually every contemporaneous movement.

Appropriately, many subsequent developments and innovations seem to be foreshadowed throughout the exhibition. The American school of abstract expressionists, from Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning through Franz Kline and even sculptor David Smith, deployed the same dynamism and set of shapes that characterized Kandinsky’s work in the 1910s and 20s. His later style’s rigid lines, clean forms and clear backdrops evoke the carefully orchestrated chaos of post-Pop artists like Takashi Murakami and contemporary abstract artists like Julie Mehretu–his “Dominant Curve” (1936, below) is uncannily similar to some of her best work.


Those associations and implications grow organically from the exhibition, which confines its text and subject very rigidly to Kandinsky’s biography. The richness of his work, its wildly varied, multi-faceted development, testify to a uniquely rich career and invariably touches upon almost every significant art movement of the first half of the 20th century. In his opening remarks Richard Armstrong, the director of the Guggenheim, stated: “It’s important for a younger generation to understand the centrality of this artist.” By that criterion this retrospective is a resounding success: Kandinsky’s vital role in the development of modern art remains the greatest constant throughout his innumerable evolutions.

(image credits: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Musee national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris)