Epic Kandinsky - Vasily Kandinsky, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California

"Kandinsky: Compositions," which make opened last month at the looks Angeles County Museum of Art, presents a crash course in early modernism. As seen this past winter spring at the Museum of present Art in New York, the present to view managed for the first air ever, all of the seven surviving abstract paintings with mythic themes (10 originally existed) which the artist dubbed "composition" and which he considered his greatest in quantity important works. This surprisingly intense exhibition constitutes a major diplomatic and art-historical coup for Magdalena Dabrowski, senior curator in the department of drawings at MOMA. Dabrowski, a Polish-born art historian who is well known for her exhibitions upon Liubov Popova and Philip Guston's drawings, is not a Kandinsky specialist. nevertheless she has succeeded where all others have failed in bringing together major loans from Russia with a wide range of supplementary materials - drawings, sketches, painted studies for the "Compositions" - and giving to this exceedingly manifold material one of the greatest in quantity lucid and judicious readings in new memory.

Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was almost fatally overexpos for me in the early 1980 through three large, successive shows at the solomon R Guggenheim Museum in novel York. Seeing "Kadinsky in Munich: 1896-1914" 1914" in 1982 "Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years" in 1983 and "Kandinsky in Paris: 1934-1944" in 1985 move rounded out to be just too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of a good thing. Kandinsky's work, in fact, became synonymous with the Guggenheim in a way that was not flattering to either. Furthermore, I don't remember isolating his Compositions" as particular standouts at that time, probably because the greatest in quantity spectacular of the large mural-size paintings, numbers IV from one side VII (dating from 1911 to 1913) were not in the "Kandinsky in Munich" display Composition VIII of 1923, from the Bauhaus years, is individual of those chestnuts of the Guggenheim collection that was included in the next to the first show, but until Dabrowski's exhibition it appeared perennially difficult to look at afresh.

It was single after seeing the Russian master's work in different words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings in such large group exhibits as "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985" at the LA shire Museum in 1986 or "A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War" at the Barbican Art Gallery in London in 1994 that I began to think about his art in of recent origin ways. Kandinsky was one of the hallmarks for the reexploring of arcane spirituality in late-'80s abstraction. In the L.A. present to view Kandinsky appeared side by side with Mondrian as well as unknown early 20th-century figures similar as Hilma af Klint [see A.i.A., Dec '89] They all had been fans of one as well as the other Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner. Kandinsky had also been lengthy associated with certain pastoral and apocalyptic tendencies in Northem Romantic painting; together with Franz Marc and Emil Nolde, he made an appearance in Robert Rosenblum's present Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (1975) on the contrary to see Kandinsky's cataclysmic abstractions as anticipating sum of two units catastrophes, both World War I and World War II (Composition X is dated 1939) was a revelation that struck me forcibly single in the drastic concision of the MOMA show

Kandinsky was 43 and living in Munich when he painted his first "Compositions" in the winter of 1909-10 He already had behind him an extensive education at the University of Moscow in law and ethnology, which he had abandoned at the age of 30 to become a painter. below the spell of Monet and Wagner, he decided to consecrate himself to art, moved to Munich in 1896 studied with the Slovenian painter Anton Azbe and the Symbolist Franz von Stuck and plane cofounded his own exhibiting society and academy called Phalanx in 1901.

In 1906 he worn out a year in Serves, outside Paris, to better assimilate the exercise s of the Neo-Impressionists and Symbolists; Maurice Maeterlinck was a favorite source during this early period. At the same time, Kandinsky was expos to the breaking unfoldings of Matisse and the Fauves. In January 1909 back in Munich, he cofound still another exhibiting society, the Neue Kunstlervereinigung (New Artists' Society), or NKVM When his Conposition V was set asideed by the NKVM in December 1911 he and his friends Franz Marc, Gabriele Munter and Alfred Kubin resigned; later that month they set on the first Blaue Reiter exhibition, in Munich. In the midst of all this activity, Kandinsky was in the proces of getting divorced from his next to the first cousin, Anna Chimiakin, whom he had married back in 1892 He was already sharing his life with Munter a painter and former scholar from the Phalanx years. The pair was spending large amounts of time in a house that Munter had bought in the idyllic, sub-Alpine village of Murnau outside Munich.

In her eminent catalogue essay, Dabrowski makes us diocese that all of these biographical strands are somehow or other manifest in the "Compositions." The early ethnological studies in Russia, which culminated in a paper published in 1889 upon the pagan religions of the Zyrians, a Finno-Ugric tribe in northeastern Siberia, are distantly throw backed in what Dabrowski sees as the vibrant color and veiled, shamanistic imagery of the "Compositions." Kandinsky's early regard with affection of Wagner, and his epiphanic experience of hearing Lohengrin in Moscow in 1896 approachs back in the recurring musical metaphor of the paintings; Dabrowski compares these paintings to works by dint of Scriabin and Schoenberg, both acquaintances of the artist.