Sunday, November 22, 2009

Gugenheim Celebrates 50 Years With Kandinsky Retrospective

Just in from The Los Angeles Times, a review of the Kandinsky retrospective going on now at the Gugenheim Museum in Manhatten. Kandinsky is of special interest to New Creation because of his life-long concern with the religious dimension(s) in visual art, which he laid out explicitly in his still provocative short book, "Concerning The Spiritual In Art" (you can take a look at it on Amazon by clicking here).

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

Reporting from New York - "Kandinsky," the big exhibition of 95 oil paintings made between 1902 and 1942 by the visionary pioneer of abstraction, Vasily Kandinsky, is a show that looks like it was made expressly for the spiral ramp of the Guggenheim Museum. That's because in a sense it was.

Solomon R. Guggenheim, the museum's founder, was a major collector of Kandinsky's art, amassing no fewer than 150 canvases in his lifetime. (He died in 1949, five years after the artist.) The work was perhaps the most profound influence on the collector's thinking about nonobjective painting, which shed direct relationships to the visible world. Kandinsky instead explored the emotive possibilities of color and form, study central to avant-garde art for the next half a century.

In 1939, a scant decade after the collector bought his first Kandinsky, he opened the Museum of Nonobjective Painting -- the precursor to today's Guggenheim. And 20 years after that, Frank Lloyd Wright's radically designed Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue opened, showing just how much nonobjective art had informed a variety of advanced ideas. A powerfully expressive, light-filled void pierces the building's core.

Wright's building recently underwent a much-needed, beautifully achieved restoration. As a celebration of its 50th anniversary, the Kandinsky retrospective (running until Jan. 13) not surprisingly elicits a major "Wow."

No comments:

Post a Comment