This retrospective brings together more than 90 paintings by Vasily Kandinsky drawn primarily from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich—the institutions whose holdings comprise the three largest repositories of Kandinsky’s work in the world—as well as from significant private and public collections. This unprecedented international collaboration brings together works that rarely travel, offering a historic opportunity to reexamine the artist’s visionary legacy.
Exhibition Overview
The exhibition investigates Kandinsky’s contributions to the development of abstract painting in the 20th century. It traces his vision through thematic motifs, such as the horse and rider, mountainous landscapes, tumultuous seascapes, apocalyptic imagery, and other religious subjects. The show also offers a comprehensive chronological survey of Kandinsky’s work through a selection of his most important canvases, including examples from his series of Improvisations, Impressions, and Compositions.
No artist epitomizes the character of the Guggenheim Museum quite like Kandinsky. His work has been closely linked with the institution’s history and is a major part of its permanent collection. In 1929, the museum’s founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim, counseled by Hilla Rebay, who later became the museum’s first director, started acquiring works by Kandinsky, ultimately purchasing more than 150 of his paintings.
Guggenheim became a champion of Kandinsky and nonobjective art, a style that sought to break with the empirical world and aspired to communicate spiritual and utopian ideas. His enthusiasm eventually led to the opening the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939, now known as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Kandinsky is curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Associate Curator for Collections and Exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Christian Derouet, Curator at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Annegret Hoberg, Curator at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Karole Vail, Assistant Curator, aided with the New York presentation.
This exhibition is organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, in cooperation with the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Generous support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal agency; and Baibakov Art Projects.
This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
The Guggenheim Museum gratefully acknowledges the Leadership Committee for Kandinsky.
About the artist
Born in Moscow to a wealthy family, Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) spent his early childhood in Odessa, Russia (now Ukraine). His parents instilled in him an early love of music that later influenced his work. Though he studied law and economics at the University of Moscow and his life seemed destined to follow a conventional path, at age 30 he abruptly decided to abandon his legal career and devote himself to art.
His decision was prompted by two important experiences. In 1895 he attended an Impressionist exhibition, where he saw a Haystack painting by French artist Claude Monet (1840–1926). Stirred by the encounter, Kandinsky later realized that the paintings’ color and composition, not their subject matter, caused his response. At a concert in 1896, he noticed that music can elicit an emotional response without a connection to a recognizable subject. This experience led him to believe that painting should aspire to be as abstract as music.
In 1896 Kandinsky left Russia for Munich, where he studied art and began to pursue his new career. In 1908, while in his early 40s, he began developing a range of artistic tools, gradually stripping away recognizable imagery from his work. Kandinsky participated in several of the 20th century’s most influential and controversial art movements, among them the group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), which he founded in 1911 with German artist Franz Marc (1880–1916). As Kandinsky stated: “We thought up the name while sitting at a café table. . . . Both of us were fond of blue things, Marc of blue horses and I of blue riders. So the title suggested itself.” [1] In 1912 Kandinsky’s book Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), the first theoretical treatise on abstraction, was published. It examined the capacity of color to communicate the artist’s innermost psychological and spiritual concerns.
Kandinsky’s life was strongly affected by the wars and politics that raged in Europe during the early 20th century. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Kandinsky left Germany and moved back to Moscow. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, he remained in Russia and in 1921 returned to Germany. In 1929 he became a German citizen—one of the three nationalities he held during his life, along with Russian and French—but the Nazis’ rise to power and their closure in 1933 of the "degenerate" Bauhaus, where he taught, forced him to move to France. Despite the war and German occupation of France, his works were shown in small exhibitions. In 1939 he became a French citizen and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine outside Paris in 1944. His reputation had been firmly established in the United States through numerous shows and his introduction to American collectors, including Solomon R. Guggenheim, who became one of his most enthusiastic supporters.
