ART

Endowed with Life

Who was the first abstract artist? There
are many claimants, from Picabia to the
obscure Lithuanian Ciurlionis. But if one
angles the question a little and asks who
was the first painter to produce a major
life’s work from systematic abstraction,
there is only one answer: Wassily Kand-
insky, who was born in Moscow more
than a century ago, in 1866, and died in
France in 1944. “I really believe,”
Kandinsky wrote toward the end of his
life, “that I am the first and only artist
to throw not just the ‘subject’ out of my
paintings, but every ‘object’ as well.”
Thanks to the Guggenheim Museum,
whose founder bought more than 100 KANDINSKY—THE ORIGINAL ABSTRACTIONIST
Kandinskys during the 1930s, there has (clockwise from right): No. 160b.
always been a special relationship between (Improvisation 28), 1912; Landscape near
the artist and a city he never visited, New Murnau, 1909; Ribbon with Squares, No.
York. Next week a major Kandinsky 731; Pink Sweet, No. 481; Composition 8,
retrospective opens at the Guggenheim,
giving New Yorkers and others a further each other like embroidery—as in Pink its airy, sinuous quality as its decorative through the high grass in its strong jaws Composition 8, No. 260, 1923, painted cannot be guessed; they evoke what
chance to assess this curious, prophetic Sweet, No. 481, 1929—is very Russian. way of filling space: a painting like to uncertain but important destinations. after he moved to the Bauhaus in Weimar Kandinsky called “floating sensations,”
and rather aloof figure and to see how Even Kandinsky’s subsequent color theory, Landscape near Murnau, as late as1909, Everything shows me its face, its innermost to teach. whose only concern is with thrust and
close to the core of modernism his visions his belief in the character and meaning is full of references to the style with its being, its secret soul, which is more often Not the least of Kandinsky’s achievements counterthrust, disembodied, in free fall.
lay. of different colors and their use as a slow, thick contour of white cloud, its silent than heard.” is that he worked out the first viable Kandinsky’s sensitivity to color was
Kandinsky was a late starter. He painted structured language, may well have carefully silhouetted forms of green hill Floating sensations. For Kandinsky, all alternative to Cubist space—and did it so extreme that, had he not been an artist,
nothing serious until he was 30, and his stemmed from the symbolic use of color and pink road. objects were endowed with life (an animistic as early as 1915. He was not concerned it might have been a neurosis; and the
seminal work hardly began until he had in Russian popular art. Yet the crucial issue for Kandinsky idea that Miro later developed brilliantly). with what exercised the Cubists and later action of one color on its neighbor was
turned his 40th year. But the influences Secret Souls. When he decided to was not style but vision There is something This aliveness, as English Critic Paul became an absolute fetish in American the object of study in this weightless
were already being laid down. A student abandon his academic career and paint, hallucinatory about the richness of Kan- Overy put it in a recent study of Kandinsky, painting, the “problem” of filling the laboratory. He was sometimes too ridden
of law and political economy at the Uni- Kandinsky moved to Munich and studied dinsky’s stock of inner images. Of his “interacted with our own aliveness, thus picture plane. In fact he strove to destroy with theory, sometimes tangled in the
versity of Moscow, he visited rural Russia there. After the provincialism of Russia, way of seeing, he wrote that “everything creating reality.” One can feel its pressure, the illusion of a unified, comprehensible impossible web of his own tiny pictorial
on an ethnological survey in 1889 and the artists’ colony of Schwabing absorbed ‘dead’ trembled. Not only the stars, moon, vivid and tremulous, in the darting lines surface, which representational art had decisions. But there has never been a
there saw a lot of folk art. Its rigid him. He called it “a spiritual island in woods, flowers of which the poets sing, and patches of color beneath which a gained by means of perspective and which modern painter in whom idea, purpose
iconography and flamboyant patterns made the great world.” This was in 1897, at but also a cigarette butt lying in the landscape is forming in No. 160b. Cubism achieved through its multiplicity and act ran more harmoniously than in
a vast impression on him; the ceremonious the height of the Jugendstil , or Art ashtray, a patient white trouser button (Improvisation 28), 1912, no less than in of facets. The forms of Ribbon with Kandinsky at his best. Perhaps there never
detail of his later abstractions, with their Nouveau, movement. What Kandinsky looking up from a puddle in the street, the cooler, more architectural forms of Squares, No. 731, 1944, simply hover in will be.
tiny squares, circles and triangles “tuning” go from Art Nouveau was not so much a submissive bit of bark that an ant drags the great demonstration pieces, like an illimitable field of color, whose depth ■ Robert Hughes

TIME, MAY 15, 1972 TIME, MAY 15, 1972