If you are a person who doesn’t “get” art, there is something thrilling about Wassily Kandinsky. Because trying too hard to find something concrete under all the sugary colours, random shapes and squiggles would give anyone a headache.
“Looking at a painting by Kandinsky, we are simultaneously looking at what it is concealing,” the art historian and painter John Golding once wrote. Critic David Sylvester instructed that no one should not stare too long: “As soon as we look at the picture, it starts making faces at us,” he huffed. “Some day Kandinsky will be the best known and best loved of men,” a starry-eyed Diego Rivera wrote in 1931; for now, though, he’s mostly known as opaque and impenetrable.
The Russian artist once deemed a dangerous “degenerate” by the Nazis hurtled from impressionism to expressionism to abstraction over four decades from 1896 until his death in 1944. He didn’t begin painting until he was 30, having been inspired by one of Monet’s haystack paintings, which showed him the dazzling possibilities of art. . Years later, late in his studio one night, he’d have another earth-shattering realisation while gazing upon one of his own paintings, laid on its side: subject matter did not matter.
The biggest Kandinsky show ever staged in Australia has arrived at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, his first solo show here in more than 40 years. It arrives two years after a similar exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim museum: Solomon R Guggenheim was such a Kandinsky fan that he snapped up more than 150 of his paintings over 20 years. (Kandinsky’s instantly recognisable 1923 painting Composition 8 once hung in Guggenheim’s bedroom.)
“Abstraction had existed in diverse world cultures for millennia, but in Europe, Kandinsky is right at the forefront,” says Megan Fontanella, curator of modern art and provenance at the Guggenheim, who also curated the AGNSW show. “He was radical. And I strongly believe he is very accessible.”
A big show is the best way to experience him. “Sometimes you might see one of his 1923 geometric works out of context, and you have no idea how he got there, or where he would go – but all his works speak to one another,” she says.
Kandinsky wrote long treatises about what certain symbols and colours meant to him, although the task of decoding what it all means feels almost silly when faced with one of his painting. Take the colour red – in his own words, it represents: “Strength, energy, purpose, striving, resistance, resoluteness, violence, passion, joy, triumph, high sound, and the penetrating call of fanfares mixed with tuba./Everything human.” Blue meant balance and purity. White: silence and possibility. Black: grief and death. (Unsurprisingly, he was fascinated by synaesthesia; we will never know if he had it.)
Shapes also had special meaning: Russian icon St George, a frequent subject in his early paintings, eventually morphed into a circle, standing in for the concept of cosmic balance. Triangles were metaphors for the way avant-garde art was leading society forward. “The impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle is actually as overwhelming in effect as the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo,” he once wrote.
It’s not a comparison many others would make – but you can still appreciate the sheer spectacle of Kandinsky without understanding him, says Fontanella. “You don’t have to know that yellow, for instance, sounds to him like a trumpet blast, to know that yellow is a bold colour or to feel that painting as bold,” she says, gesturing at his Yellow Painting (1938) on the wall. “There’s something very intuitive about him. Often times he’s threading that needle between abstraction and representation, where you might still have what looks like a reclining couple or the evocation of a cannon, the suggestion of an amoeba – he’s putting something in there to help you feel a little at ease.”
History can weigh heavily on some people; Kandinsky more than most. He was criticised by his countrymen for being dangerously singular. Russian poet and revolutionary Anatoly Lunacharsky once described Kandinsky as being “obviously in the final stage of psychic degeneration … why do they permit him to exhibit, really?” By 1914 Kandinsky was forced to move from Munich back to Russia when Germany declared war. His homecoming coincided with the Russian Revolution of 1917; the previously wealthy artist watched as his family land and fortune was redistributed by Bolshevicks. In 1920 his three-year-old son Lodya died of causes attributed to malnutrition. Kandinsky and his wife, Nina, moved back to Germany the following year.
The rise of the Bauhaus movement, of which Kandinsky was part, coincided with the rise of the Nazis. The art school dodged increasingly conservative local governments in Weimar, Dessau and then Berlin, before being shut down in 1933. In 1937, the Nazis ordered that 57 Kandinsky paintings be removed from German museums; 14 of those were displayed in the Nazi’s famous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich. It was less an art show than a freak show, encouraging Germans to sniff at artists Hitler had accused of being “driving forces of corruption”. Kandinsky fled the Nazis to Paris in 1939. The Nazis followed him there a year later.
You may not understand all the circles and lines, but history is so visible in Kandinsky’s paintings. The early jewel-toned rural scenes in Munich, when he was still trying to figure out what kind of painter he was. The sherbet pastels of his work in Paris, where he found the light brighter. And his last paintings, noticeably smaller and thinner than the rest, which were painted on paper and board due to wartime canvas shortages. He lived long enough to see Paris liberated in August 1944, but died four months later in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, at the age of 78. He did not see the end of the war.
Among his contemporaries – Matisse, Picasso, Klee, Duchamp, Chagall, Breton, Miró, Dali – Kandinsky as a man feels almost as abstract as his works. But glimpses of him are visible, says Fontanella.
“He wrote about his art with great enthusiasm … but he held the more salient personal details close to his chest,” she says. “We know small things – he was a cyclist, he enjoyed getting out of the city and into nature. And from his vast array of interests – religion, science, music, folklore – we know this is a person who’s very curious, who is really looking at the world around him.”
“People think they know Kandinsky because maybe they know Blue Mountain,” she adds. “But there’s so much more to his life – he will surprise you.”
Kandinsky opens at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Saturday and runs until 10 March 2024.
