The early going in the Vasily Kandinsky retrospective, at the Guggenheim Museum, is gruellingly pleasurable, with splurges of paint as vertiginous as Frank Lloyd Wright’s building. It is a kind of apotheosis, seeing this work—mainly from the years 1909-14, when its creator invented and road-tested abstract art—in this museum, whose founding collection centered on Kandinsky, and whose architecture ratified his spirit of shoot-the-works modernity. Not for the first time, but with extra verve, the spiral ramp acts as a time machine, whirling us back into years when it seemed that paint on a brush could change the world. The feeling may begin to fade, like the dream that it always was, when you’re out on Fifth Avenue again, but a certain queasiness will likely accompany you home. Kandinsky’s best art, which climaxes in the period of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, demands more indulgent fortitude, amounting almost to physical courage, than that of any of the other half-dozen greatest artists of the early twentieth century. His artistic personality, at once narcissistic and hectoring, tempts us to shrug him off. I still do in the case of most of his later work, with its fustian arrays of glyphs and ciphers, which crowd the picture plane like bugs peppering a windshield. But Kandinsky’s excesses make him easy to underrate, too. He was really something.
Kandinsky was born to an haut-bourgeois family in Moscow in 1866, and moved soon afterward to Odessa—he was a near-contemporary of Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, and Munch, and fourteen years older than Picasso. He was thirty when he started painting, after training in law and economics, and forty-three when, in 1909, he hit his stride among the Expressionists in and around Munich, with whom, in 1911, he formed the Blue Rider group, named for one of his paintings. His art has nothing important in common with Cubism, Futurism, or the other breakout movements of the epoch. His independence of Picasso made him a crucial influence on the efforts to blow open the knitted pictorial space of Parisian modernism—first of Joan Miró and later of Arshile Gorky and the Abstract Expressionists. The formal difference is apparent in Kandinsky’s shadings of fragmented shapes: they stay flat, rarely suggesting the outward and inward tilts, the bumps and hollows, of Cubism. Any illusion of internal space is usually an effect of the “push and pull” (a famous formulation by the artist and teacher Hans Hofmann) of cool and warm colors, or the front-and-back dynamic of linear designs overlaid on colored grounds.
Kandinsky’s ambitious theories of abstraction, promulgated in his book “On the Spiritual in Art,” published in 1911, constitute a dicier legacy. Saturated in Theosophist mysticism, eccentric takes on science, and, most of all, accounts of his own subjective process, the theories relate only tangentially to the two most cogent innovators of abstract painting, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. Each of them found a way, by reduction, to establish fundamental forms that yield firm and clear impressions. Kandinsky remained, at heart, a romantic idealist of a nineteenth-century Germanic sort, enraptured by the tumult of his feelings. His preservation of that cast of mind happened to keep alight a slow-burning fuse for Abstract Expressionism, which reoriented modern painting to dramas of personal emotion.
Kandinsky married a cousin in 1892. In 1896, he was thunderstruck by two works of art—a Monet “Haystack” and a performance of Richard Wagner’s “Lohengrin”—and moved to Munich, whose art schools were magnets for Russian and Eastern European students. An inheritance from an uncle, in 1901, of a Moscow apartment building staked him to the comfortable means of a rentier. His first striking works are illustrational and bejewelled-looking fairy-tale paintings, inspired by folk art and in key with Jugendstil decoration. In 1903, he took up with a student from a painting class he taught, Gabriele Münter, a lifelong Fauvist given to chromatic landscapes. Fleeing his marriage, he travelled with Münter restlessly throughout Europe, spending a year in Paris, and in Tunisia. In 1905, his brother died in the Russo-Japanese War, and Kandinsky went back to Odessa, briefly, during the revolution of that year. A painting by Münter from 1912 (not in the show) conveys the feverish charms of a bohemian ménage: Kandinsky, neatly bearded and bespectacled, in shorts, raising one hand in a peremptory gesture, holds forth to a female friend after dinner in a room decorated with hot-colored little pictures and indistinct objects. It’s stirring to imagine Kandinsky’s intense conversations with his Blue Rider colleagues, including Franz Marc, Alexei Jawlensky, and Lyonel Feininger, none of whom followed him across the frontier of abstraction, perhaps as much not to risk comparison with his titanic talent as from fidelity to nature.
The English art critic David Sylvester noted that the works of Kandinsky’s great period offer “nothing tangible for us to hold on to; it is as if we were in a small boat out in a rocky sea.” The way to enjoy them, for as long as you can stand it, is to move in close and give yourself over to their waves and waterspouts, “as if you had got out of the rocking boat and decided to swim for it.” Avoid, if you can, reading cartoon imagery into their fortuitous shapes. “As soon as we look at the picture, it starts making faces at us,” Sylvester complained. (A terrific painting of 1914, “Improvisation 35,” is ruined for me by my eye’s insuperable conviction that there is a football helmet in the middle of it.) The adventure begins with imagery of landscapes and horsemen, and disintegrates into impulsive brushwork and clan-gorous color. One of Kandinsky’s last halfway representational pictures, “Impression III (Concert)” (1911), shows vestigial figures leaning into a tsunami of yellow—the impact of the artist’s first exposure to the music of Arnold Schoenberg, who became a close friend. Kandinsky set great value on a supposed kinship of painting and music, and the result was art that, like music, has meaning only through time. The time belongs to us, as actively coöperative viewers. The paintings make no sense except while we play along, responding to passages in what the art historian Meyer Schapiro called “a random flow of private and incommunicable associations.”
With the onset of the First World War, Kandinsky became an enemy alien in Germany. He moved with Münter to Switzerland and then, alone, to his Moscow apartment house. He met Nina Andreevskaya, the twenty-year-old daughter of a deceased tsarist officer, and married her, in 1917. After the Revolution, he participated, rather gingerly, in the country’s galvanic avant-garde and held various positions in the alphabet soup of fledgling Soviet cultural institutions. During a spell of making art only intermittently, he created what for me is his most extraordinary painting, “Overcast” (1917). It develops visceral forms in an uncharacteristically sensual, infolding space, with bright colors signalling from a general collapse into darkness. “Overcast” is so akin to the poetry of anxiety in Gorky’s masterpieces of the nineteen-forties that I fancy an electric arc across the intervening decades.
In 1921, Kandinsky moved with Nina to Berlin, where the art world embraced him. He soon became a prominent teacher at the Bauhaus, in Weimar and, later, Dessau; in 1928 he took German citizenship. He could luxuriate in social and professional contacts with leading lights—including membership in an exhibiting group, the Blue Four, with Paul Klee, Feininger, and Jawlensky—but his style calcified into tricky panoplies of stock modernistic forms, more suited to punchy graphic art than to the fascinations of painting. Though Kandinsky’s inventiveness never flagged, as a sideshow at the Guggenheim of his unquenchably lively drawings confirms, his sense of “inner necessity” (a key term in his theory of art) wandered. With busy, compulsively tidy compositions, in increasingly sugary colors, he became his own leading imitator. (The show may rewardingly be viewed backward, from the top of the Guggenheim’s ramp: dispiriting fussiness giving way gradually, and then suddenly, to energies as thrilling as an Easter sunrise.) Kandinsky abandoned Germany in 1933. Living outside Paris, with Nina, until his death, in 1944, he added no lustre to his high repute. It seems that he considered emigrating to New York. He should have. The welcome mat was spread at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which became the Guggenheim. Our eager metropolis might have recharged his inspiration, as it did Mondrian’s. At the least, we would possess some delectable anecdotes. ♦
