"Study for Improvisaton #28" by Vassily Kandinsky |
You can take liberties when reviewing an exhibition by the author of a seminal treatise entitled “On the Spiritual in Art.” The current show at the Guggenheim "Vassily Kandinksky: Around the Circle"cleverly sandwiched between the two parts of a exhibit by the Chilian Artitst, Cecily Vicuna, “Spin Spin Triangulene,” which if you don’t know is a “polyradical framework(s) with high spinning ground states.” Vicuna, in fact, quotes Kandinsky thusly “The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in balance.” The artist himself describes his poetics as an exploration of “the expressive potential of color in the symbolic often spiritual resonance of forms.” You might call this ur-abstraction. "Around the Circle" underscores the enormous influence Kandinsky had on almost all abstract art.There are intimations of Miro’s dreams and Braque’s geometry, just to name a few. Kandinsky’s spiritualism opened the door to surrealism too. He said: “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays touching one key or aother to cause vibrations in the soul.” The show itself starts from the end of Kandinsky’s career and as you significantly circle upwards leads back to the beginning, with the museum's architecture inadvertently making its own statement about the trajectory of the artist's career. BTW, talking about the arc of life and the spiritual (vs the material?), Kandinsky didn't start out as a starving artist. He had inherited some real estate which he lost after the revolution in l917.
read "Inventing Abstraction at MoMA" by Francis Levy, HuffPost
and listen to 'Walking on Broken Glass" by Annie Lennox
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