Art Review
Back in the Blue Saddle, for a Gallop to Abstraction
Neue Galerie Examines 15 Years of Kandinsky
Musée National d'Art Moderne. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
Kandinsky’s sketch of a panel
for a 1922 art show in Berlin. The mural has been recreated for the
exhibition at the Neue Galerie.
By KAREN ROSENBERG
New Yorkers might be forgiven for greeting “Vasily Kandinsky: From Blaue
Reiter to the Bauhaus, 1910-1925,” at the Neue Galerie, with a shrug
and a distinct feeling of déjà vu. Wasn’t it just three years ago now
that the Guggenheim mounted a full retrospective, a delirium-inducing helix of Kandinskys?
This, however, is a different kind of show: a boutique Kandinsky
exhibition at a boutique museum. (Surprisingly, it’s the first
all-Kandinsky affair in the Neue’s 12-year history). And it centers on a
rich period — also the purview of the Museum of Modern Art’s recent “Inventing Abstraction,
1910-1925” — that saw Kandinsky moving from the prismatic Expressionism
of Der Blaue Reiter, the Munich-based artist group named for the motif
of a blue horse and rider, into pure abstraction and from easel
paintings into set designs and decorative murals.
The exhibition is further distinguished by a reconstruction of one of
those mural projects, first made for the 1922 Juryfreie Kunstschau
(Jury-Free Art Show) in Berlin: a total Kandinsky immersion, with
brightly colored lines and circles and wobbly little forms glowing
against black and dark-brown walls.
Elsewhere the installation is choppy, as is often the case in these
galleries. Walls have been color-blocked in shades of lavender, ivory
and plum, as if viewers could not be trusted to distinguish between,
say, Kandinsky’s woozy Blaue Reiter paintings and the clean-edged
geometry of his Bauhaus phase. The inescapable soundtrack of Mussorgsky
and Schoenberg does not help to smooth things over.
But over all, the show’s fits and starts feel true to Kandinsky’s
growing pains during these formative years for abstract art. They also
make clear that his philosophies, codified in his famous book “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” did not always mesh with the more pragmatic approaches of his colleagues and collectors.
As an instructor at the Bauhaus, for instance, where he taught from 1922
until it was shuttered by the Nazis in 1933, he chafed at the school’s
idea of painting as an applied art. “Many demand that we should serve
industry, that we should supply patterns for materials, ties, socks,
crockery, parasols, ashtrays, carpets,” he wrote. “Or that we should
leave off painting pictures once and for all.”
Organized by the art historian Jill Lloyd, the show stresses networks
and associations over chronology. It moves from the Blaue Reiter years
of 1911-14 to the Bauhaus, but then backtracks to a gallery of larger
paintings made for American collectors around the time of the 1913
Armory Show. From there it skips to the experimental theater and mural
work, concluding with the Jury-Free project of 1922.
All of this back-and-forth can make the show feel a bit unmoored.
Fortunately, it’s stabilized by some judicious loans, among them Franz
Marc’s mystically intense painting “The Large Blue Horses” from the
Walker Art Center and such Kandinsky works as “Fugue” from the Fondation
Beyeler in Basel, the Guggenheim’s “Painting with White Border,” and
several abstractions from the Yale University Art Gallery’s important
“Société Anonyme” collection.
Yale’s “Improvisation 7 (Storm),” from 1910, for instance, hangs next to
two early Kandinsky streetscapes (1908 and 1909) from the Neue’s
collection; together, these works show him making a transition out of
Post-Impressionism, melting down its forms without changing the acidity
of the palette.
And in the next gallery, four works from MoMA reveal Kandinsky’s deep
ambivalence about the decorative possibilities of abstract painting.
Titled “The Seasons,” these brushy, densely patterned panels were
painted in 1914 for the foyer of the auto magnate Edwin R. Campbell’s
Park Avenue apartment.
The collector Arthur Jerome Eddy, who knew Campbell and helped Kandinsky
secure the commission, had suggested that the panels be modeled on an
earlier painting in his own collection, one “so brilliant in color that
it makes a beautiful wall decoration.” In three of the Campbell panels,
Kandinsky complied, but the remaining one is noticeably darker and
muddier — signaling, perhaps, a level of discomfort with the
appreciation of his paintings as a kind of benign wallpaper.
For him, expanding painting from easels to walls was part of a larger
mission to bring the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total
artwork, into the 20th century. As the catalog essayist Rose-Carol
Washton Long points out, that mission was as political as it was
aesthetic; Kandinsky advocated clashes of sound and color, “multiple
dissonant stimuli,” the better to disrupt complacency.
With the murals for the Jury-Free show, he had a chance to practice
environmental painting on his own terms. The setting, an octagonal
entrance hall for a modern art museum, was ideal for a wraparound
artwork. Directing a team of students from the Bauhaus mural workshop,
Kandinsky had them paint a scattering of geometric and biomorphic shapes
on large canvas-covered wood panels. The originals were dismantled at
the close of the 1922 Show and subsequently lost, but process
photographs and a complete set of sketches survive.
One peculiar problem plagues the Neue’s re-creation, which has been
executed by Daedalus Design and Production and is accompanied by
recordings of atonal piano pieces by Schoenberg: the paintings have been
reproduced exactingly from Kandinsky’s sketches, as if they had been
enlarged, so that each wobble of the brush or hastily filled-in area is
magnified. Ms. Lloyd said she was trying to distinguish this
reconstruction from a tidier, more interpretive one presented at the
Pompidou Center in Paris in 1976, but it’s nonetheless a distracting
curatorial choice.
If you are able to look past it, however, you’ll be rewarded with the
rare sensation of floating around inside a Kandinsky — one that merges
the rigid geometry of his Bauhaus period with the wavy lines and
kaleidoscopic clusters of his earlier abstract canvases. It connects the
Gesamtkunstwerk to more contemporary multisensory installation art, and
is as good an excuse as any for yet another Kandinsky show.
"Exquisite Corpse: Game of folded paper played by several people,
who compose a sentence or drawing without anyone seeing the preceding collaboration
or collaborations. The now classic example, which gave the game its name, was
drawn from the first sentence obtained this way: The-exquisite-corpse-will-drink-new-wine."
Mantis Shrimp
