Lipnitzki / Roger Vioillet / Getty
Kandinsky in
1936
Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), one of the pioneers of abstract
painting, is the subject of a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
It follows him through a life that took Kandinsky from his native Russia to
Germany as a young artist, back to Russia just before and after the revolution,
then to Germany again to spend years teaching at the Bauhaus, and, after Adolf
Hitler came to power, to a final exile in Paris.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum / Artist Rights Society /
ADAGP
Blue Mountain, 1908-09
It wasn't until the summer of 1908, when he discovered the little
town of Murnau in the Bavarian Alps, that Kandinsky began to uncouple his
pictures from any sources in the visible world. In Blue Mountain, which he began
the following winter, he assigned the mountain an unearthly shade of indigo and
turned the flanking trees into almost free-floating pools of pigment.
Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi / Artist Rights Society /
ADAGP
Picture With a Circle,
1911
Kandinsky had a lifelong fascination with mysticism. Circles
represented many things to him, including symbols of celestial order. He once
said of them: "Of the three primary forms [triangle, square, circle], it points
most clearly to the fourth dimension." This may be his first entirely abstract
work.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum / Artist Rights Society /
ADAGP
Improvisation 28 (second version),
1912
With this painting Kandinsky appears to have been attempting to
represent cosmic turmoil, with apocalyptic events suggested on the left and
signs of redemption on the right, where what looks to be a church on a hilltop
is visible in the upper right hand corner.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum / Artist Rights Society /
ADAGP
Composition 8, 1923
By
the 1920s, when he was teaching at the Bauhaus, the famed German school of
modern art and design, Kandinsky had introduced more hard-edged geometric forms
into his work. This was partly as a response to the geometrical abstraction of
Russian modernists like Kazimir Malevich and El Lizzitsky, which he had
encountered during a long final stay in Russia in the years before and after the
1917 revolution.
Mus[a {e}]e national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris /
Artist Rights Society / ADAGP
Yellow-Red-Blue,
1925
Over the years Kandinsky developed elaborate theories about
color, which he laid out in his 1912 book On
the Spiritual in Art. He wrote that yellow was an "earthly color" that
"could never have profound meaning." Blue was the "heavenly color." As for red,
"it has not the irresponsible appeal of yellow, but rings inwardly with a
determined and powerful intensity."
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
O'Keeffe in 1918
During
her lifetime Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was one of the most popular American
painters, famous especially for her spare scenes of New Mexico, where she
settled permanently in 1949. A new show at the Whitney Museum of Art focuses on
her lifelong interest in abstraction, a format she first arrived at in 1915,
very early in its history.
Early Abstraction,
1915
In 1915 O'Keeffe was a 28-year-old art teacher stuck at a small
women's college in South Carolina. one year earlier, she had been living happily
in New York City and getting her first eager taste of Picasso, Braque and
American modernists like John Marin. Stranded in a place she called the "tail
end of the world," she decided to go where none of those artists had ventured.
Drawing on the liquid forms of Art Nouveau and her own churning inner life, she
produced an astonishing series of purely abstract charcoal drawings.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York / Georgia O'Keeffe
Museum / Artist Rights Society
Music, Pink and Blue No. 2,
1919
Like Kandinsky, O'Keeffe believed that colors corresponded to
musical tones. Pictures like this one, with its ambiguously sexual imagery, got
O'Keeffe labeled as an artist concerned only with ｅxpressions of womanhood — an
understanding of her work that she found exasperating.
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Red & Orange Streak,
1919
"I work in a queer sort of unconscious way," she once wrote,
"more feeling than brain." The American painter Charles Demuth once said of her
work, "Each color almost regains the fun it must have felt within itself when it
formed the first rainbow."
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York / Georgia O'Keeffe
Museum / Artist Rights Society
Abstraction, 1926
Here
the artist plays games with flatness and depth. Though it might be completely
abstract, the pulsing sheets of light in this picture also linked O'Keeffe to
the traditions of American landscape painting and the American Sublime.
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia / Georgia O'Keeffe
Museum / Artist Rights Society
Black Door with Red,
1954
In this picture painted the year she turned 67, O'Keeffe
radically distills the image of a doorway in an adobe dwelling to produce a
painting that appears to respond to the Color Field painting of younger artists
like Barnett Newman and looks ahead to the Minimalism of the early 1960s.
