11/21/09 Guggenheim Museum

Kandinsky at the Guggenheim:

I visited the Guggenheim Museum. There were long lines to get tickets for the Kandinsky Exhibit. Although the museum was crowded the exhibit was easily viewed. The Frank Lloyd Wright design allowed for adequate spacing of the art works in a way that it could accommodate large crowds. The spiral design was basically a long corridor which wound itself to the top. The viewers proceeded in an orderly fashion in one of two directions, bottom-up or top-down. The flow of viewers did not have to fight for optimal viewing position since each individual saw the art works in the same way. I found this to be less tiring.

Kandinsky was forced to move around to many places because of political and economic reasons. But, he never came to America, although he was invited to come, 'home' was always in Europe. Because of his 'inner need' to express himself through art, he never finished his university studies in law and economics. He believed that art should express the innermost feelings of the artist, a new spiritual reality. A vocabulary needed to be developed to allow for this kind of expression. Much of his inspiration came from the his association with Arnold Schoenberg, an innovator of contemporary music. As much as the twelve-tone system of Schoenberg was used to break away from traditional conventions, Kandinsky also wanted to break away from representational art and become more abstract. His first truly non-objective painting was "Black Lines" done in 1913:

His color palette was changing from vibrant primary colors to subtle pastel hues. This conveyed to me a truer sense of spiritual regeneration. A later work, Movement I (1935) demonstrates a sophisticated vocabulary:

In this colorful galaxy, ribbons of color float amid complex geometric structures against a backdrop of circles large and small. Their edges are irregular. By now Kandinsky has stopped using the compass to draw his favorite motif, he wants to achieve the evocative powers of the circle:

1) the circle is the most modest form, but it asserts itself unconditionally.

2) it is precise but an inexhaustible variable.

3) simultaneously, it is stable and it is unstable.

4) simultaneously, it is loud and it is soft.
5) the circle is a single tension that carries countless tensions within it.

--indeed, the circle is the ideal symbol for this image which suggests infinity.

"Yellow-Red-Blue" is an important painting of the Bauhaus era.

While teaching at the Bauhaus, he collected images of embryology, zoology, and botany. He used these images for his lectures and re-formulated them into his abstract vocabulary. Blending the natural sciences with formal abstraction and Surrealist elements, Kandinsky worked in a free-flowing style. A style in which I can appreciate freedom of form while retaining the motif of opposing forces that has always been pervasive in his work. I can feel how he is creating tension in his works and then finds resolution of this tension. So, it is free of conventions, a more personal style which is internally liberating and self-motivating. Kandinsky's view was that the "inner necessity" of artists could be translated into universally accepted statements that could offer a regenerative vision of the future.