Kandinsky's Painting with White Border
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October 21, 2011–January 15, 2012
Vasily
Kandinsky’s canvas, Painting with White
Border (Bild
mit weissem Rand,
May 1913)
was
inspired by a trip the artist took to Moscow in fall 1912. Upon
his
return to Munich, where he had been living intermittently since 1896,
Kandinsky
searched for a way to visually record the “extremely powerful
impressions”
of his native Russia that lingered in his memory. Over a period of
five
months, he explored various motifs and compositions in study after
study,
moving
freely between pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, and
oil. After he
produced
at least 16 studies, Kandinsky finally arrived
at the pictorial
solution
to the painting: the white border. In his
seminal 1911
treatise Über das
Geistige in der
Kunst.
Insbesondere in der Malerei (On
the Spiritual in Art: And
Painting
in Particular), Kandinsky wrote
that the color
white expresses a
“harmony of silence . . .
pregnant with
possibilities.”
This focused
exhibition,
co-organized with the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., brings the
Guggenheim’s
final
version of the painting from May 1913
together with twelve related
drawings
and watercolors and one
major oil sketch, and features the results of
an
extensive conservation
study
of the Guggenheim and Phillips paintings.
The study unearthed a
previously
unknown landscape painting beneath
the surface of the Phillips’s
Sketch
I for Painting with White Border
(Moscow) (Skizze für Bild mit weissem Rand
[Moskau], 1913). A
rare glimpse into
Kandinsky’s creative process, Kandinsky’s
Painting
with White Border
reveals the gradual and deliberate way the artist
sought
to
translate his ideas into a bold new language of abstraction.
Kandinsky’s work
is a cornerstone of the
Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum’s collection. The museum’s
founder,
industrialist
Solomon R. Guggenheim, began acquiring Kandinsky’s
paintings—including Painting with White Border—as early as 1929, and
today the
Guggenheim’s
holdings of his work are among the most extensive in the
world.
This exhibition is
supported by a grant
from
the Joseph and Sylvia Slifka Foundation.
—Tracey
Bashkoff,
Curator, Collections and Exhibitions
Vasily Kandinsky, Painting with White Border (Bild mit weissem Rand), May 1913 (detail). Oil on canvas, 140.3 x 200.3 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 37.245 © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris