A groundbreaking insight into Kandinsky

Local art lovers will be thrilled to learn that the first retrospective exhibition of Vasily Kandinsky, also the biggest ever held in Asia, is now running at the West Bund Museum through September 5.

Kandinsky (1866-1944) has an unshakable status in art history. He was one of the first painters of abstract art and a founding member of the Blue Rider Movement (1911-14).

Based in Germany, the Blue Rider group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants and native German artists, such as Franz Marc and August Macke. The name “Blue rider” referred to Kandinsky and Marc’s belief that blue was the most spiritual color and that the rider symbolized the ability to move beyond.

Even if the name of Kandinsky or the image of his works is quite familiar to many local art lovers, close access to the master will help them to better understand Kandinsky’s abstract art and his life-long path.

Thanks to donations and the bequest of Nina Kandinsky, the painter’s widow, the Centre Pompidou holds the most complete collection of this artist of Russian heritage.

Co-organized by the Pompidou Center and West Bund Museum, this retrospective exhibition traces the development of this major figure of 20th century art in the course of some hundred paintings, drawings, and engravings, including many masterpieces.

Divided in to five chapters, the show traces Kandinsky’s development from his formative period in Munich, with his founding of the Blue Rider group and the pivotal shift to abstraction in the Bavarian town Murnau, to his return to Russia during the First World War to his prolific years at the Bauhaus school in Germany, and his last year in Paris. Each chapter corresponds to a particular stage of his rich life.

Courtesy of West Bund Museum

With the collaboration with the Shanghai Museum, visitors also get to see five ancient bronze objects from late Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BC) to West Zhou Dynasty (1046-771 BC) at the site, echoing the works of Kandinsky on the wall.

The layout of the retrospective exhibition has been designed around a central piece: reconstruction of the Entrance Hall created by Kandinsky in 1922 for the Juryfreie Kunstausstellung (Jury-Free Art Exhibition) in Berlin. This monumental works is being presented in Asia for the first time, which is intended to give visitors the feeling they are moving within one of his paintings.

A chronicle introduction on the wall briefs those big events in Kandinsky’s life, and each twist and turn unwittingly helped the artist embark on the pinnacle in his art career.

After a short academic career in law and economics, Kandinsky left Russia in 1896.

Intent on studying painting, he moved to Munich, the German equivalent of the French Art Nouveau. In addition to tempera painting he learned wood engraving, promoted by the Japanese prints then in vogue.

This technique allowed him to increase the abstraction of his works by flattening the motifs and separating the different color areas. In 1901, he co-founded the Phalanx artist’s group and the next year, set up the art school of the same name, where he was to meet the young painter Gabriele Munter. She was 25 and he was 36; they married.

After the closing of the school in 1904, the couple traveled in Europe and Tunisia, and then settled in Paris (1906-07).

During this period, Kandinsky executed many outdoor oil studies with a palette knife, as well as multi-colored scenes in tempera on the background that recall Russian folktales.

The exhibition in this chapter features a group of landscape paintings that he created during this period, reflecting his development in the potential for abstraction within his pictorial means.

In May 1912, along with his friend Franz Marc, he gave an astonishingly contemporary work from to his aesthetic project: the publication of the “Blue Rider Almanac,” advocating the idea of a universal art beyond frontiers and disciplines.

The outbreak of the war in 1914 put an end to his life in Munich, Kandinsky had to return to his native land, where he contributed to restructuring artistic life in revolutionary Russia until the founder of the Bauhaus, architect Walter Gropius, invited him to return to Germany to join the art school in Weimar in 1922.

However, the closure of the institution by the Nazi regime in 1933 again forced Kandinsky into exile, this time in Paris, where he remained until the end of his life.

Kandinsky had such a profound experience both in life and art — he came to painting when he was 30 years old; he witnessed the two world wars; his female companions catered to his requirements in different periods.

For example, “To a Voice,” a piece of watercolor and ink on paper created in 1916, is thought to have been painted by Kandinsky as a souvenir of the voice of Nina Andreievskala, the daughter of a Russian general, with whom he had exchanged via telephone prior to meeting her in person.

Andreievskala, who was decades younger, later became Kandinsky’s second wife. She was fond of this work, which hung in her dining room in Paris before entering the collection of the Centre Pompidou as part of the Kandinsky bequest. The title “To a Voice” perhaps also expresses the concept Kandinsky was developing an unknown voice that seemed to guide the artist’s creative intuition.

In February 1917, the couple spent the summer in a village located 700 kilometers southwest of Moscow. This is where Kandinsky painted “Akhtyrka: Nina and Tatiana on the Veranda.”

This work stands out in the series because the presence of human figures. Actually it is the result of a rare determination in the painter’s practice to freeze an instant in his intimate life: Nina, several months pregnant, and his sister, Tatiana peacefully attending to their occupations, seated in the veranda of the house.

Music is always a privileged source of reflection for Kandinsky: it allows him to conceive a renewal of forms that will inspire him all his life.

The artist pursued a project of abstraction where the image tends to become a “field of signs” like a score. He considers that music “naturally” reaches a level of abstraction that painting must conquer.

Endowed with an openness to the natural environments, Kandinsky associates the sense of hearing with that of sight and perceives a “colored hearing.” In his work “Concerning the spiritual in art (1912),” which was intended to lay the foundations of a true “grammar” of colors and forms, Kandinsky demonstrated his attachment to the modern theory of “correspondences” and to one of its major aspects: synesthesia.

For example, the color yellow would correspond to a high-pitched sound, that of a trumpet.

Although even today the question of “who is the father of abstract art” still has been disputed, is it Piet Mondrian, Frantisek Kupka, or Kazimir Severinovich Malevich?

The decisive contribution of Kandinsky to abstract art has never been doubted in the art history.

Courtesy of West Bund Museum

Exhibition info

Dates: Through September 5 (closed on Mondays), 10am-5pm
Tickets: 120 yuan
Venue: Exhibition Hall 3, West Bund Museum
Address: 2600 Longteng Avenue