Barnett V. Vasily Kandinsky: A Selection from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Hilla von Rebay Foundation

Sydney: International Cultural Corporation of Australia Ltd., 1982. — 119 p.Vasilv Kandinsky is a central figure in the development of twentieth-century art. More than any other painter, with the possible exception of Piet Mondrian, he is identified with the transition from representational to abstract art. Kandinsky, who was born in Russia in 1866, did not begin his career as a painter until the first decade of our own century. He made his most original and important contributions to modern painting and aesthetic ideas in Munich between 1908 and 1914. After his return to Russia upon the outbreak of World War I, he worked for the revolutionary government, teaching and organising cultural institutions based upon modern ideas. When the Soviet government became hostile to avant-garde art, Kandinsky left his homeland once more for Germany and took a teaching position at the Weimar Bauhaus. He was forced to leave Germany again in 1933, when the Nazis closed the Bauhaus. This time the artist found refuge in Paris, where he spent the last eleven fruitful vears of a creative and influential life. The sequential progression of Kandinsky's revolutionary oeuvre is exceptionally clear and illuminating. His early work is representational and reveals its sources in Post-Impressionist modes. Gradually and to a certain degree paralleling the innovations of the contemporary French Fauves, Kandinsky attenuated the forms in his paintings and prints for decorative and expressive purposes. These forms, still rooted in the art of the lugendstil movement and popular paintings on glass, ultimately were reduced almost to imperceptibility in their representational function in the most radical departure in the history of twentieth-century art. Kandinsky proclaimed the autonomy of form and colour from recognizable subject matter in his art and in his writings early in the second decade of our era, when others like Mondrian, Malevich, Kupka and Delaunay were moving towards similar conclusions. Thus, Kandinsky was not alone in achieving this fundamental revision in the painting of his time, but the inventiveness and originality, the authority and strength of his work made him a leader in the development of a new style. The same intellectual integrity and courage that assured this position of leadership before World War I later enabled him to invent new modes and exert a decisive influence during his years at the Bauhaus. During that period the experessiveness of the earlier work gave way to an emphasis upon geometric structure, as painterly intuition was controlled by carefully established, rigorous systems.