Vasily Kandinsky: une de mes references en abstraction
Vasily Kandinsky, Winter Landscape with Church,
1910–11 (detail). Oil on board, 33 x 44.5 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift
37.502
The work of Post-Impressionists, such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and the Fauves, and the Cubists in Paris, all informed the development of Expressionist art in the years immediately preceding World War I. The practitioners of this style, largely working and exhibiting in Germany, crossed paths via various associations and were also deeply influenced by their encounters with Japanese and African art, as well as Germanic folk art. From Vasily Kandinsky to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, artists who came to be associated with Expressionism sought to convey the communicative force of color through vibrantly hued canvases and bold forms.
Kandinsky, an artist who has been closely linked to the history of
the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and to whom this gallery is dedicated,
became a leading theoretician on chromatic symbolism after arriving in
Munich from his native Russia at the turn of the century. Kandinsky’s
color theories, as outlined in his treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art
(1911), were echoed by Franz Marc and Alexej Jawlensky, among others.
Marc first met Kandinsky and Jawlensky when he joined the New Artists’
Association of Munich (Neue Künstlervereinigung München or NKVM) in
1911. At this time, Marc was exclusively depicting animals in nature
and endowing his colors with expressive value and symbolic meaning in a
manner similar to Kandinsky in his Bavarian landscapes. Meanwhile,
Matisse’s 1910 Munich exhibition had left a strong impression on both
Jawlensky and Kandinsky. The two shared an affinity for Matisse’s
brilliant canvases and those of the other Fauves—works Kandinsky had
had the opportunity to observe during his visit to Paris in 1906–7.
In 1911, Kandinsky and Marc formed The Blue Rider (Der Blaue
Reiter) group along with Jawlensky, Paul Klee, and other members of the
German avant-garde. The premier exhibition of this group took place
that December at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie and included
Marc’s monumental Yellow Cow (Gelbe Kuh) (1911). Two months
after the first showing, the Berlin Die Brücke (The Bridge) group, led
by Kirchner, was invited to participate in a second Blue Rider
exhibition. Kirchner and the other members of Die Brücke frequently
employed dissonant color patterns and angular stylizations to increase
the intensity of their paintings. Furthermore, Marc Chagall, who had
been working in Paris beginning in 1910, received his first solo show
in 1914 at Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, thus forming
a link with both Die Brücke and Blue Rider artists and exposing them
to his imaginative, colorful works.
The connections among these different artists were severed with the 1914 outbreak of World War I. Nonetheless, the postwar period saw the reunion of Kandinsky, Klee, and Jawlensky, who together with Lyonel Feininger, formed the Blue Four group in the United States. It was then that these artists were able to pursue their color theories with renewed vigor.
The Kandinsky Gallery regularly features Guggenheim
collection works by Vasily Kandinsky and those with whom he was
associated or who he influenced. Currently on view are eight paintings
by various artists.
—Megan Fontanella, Assistant Curator