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Anish Kapoor, Computer-generated image of Memory (2008) installed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008, Image: Courtesy Aerotrope Limited.

Anish Kapoor, Memory, 2008, Cor-Ten steel, 14.5 x 8.97 x 4.48 m, Commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG in consultation with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Installation view: Anish Kapoor: Memory, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, November 30, 2008-February 1, 2009, Photo: Mathias Schormann, © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

Anish Kapoor, Svayambh, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 2007.

Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue
New York
212-423-3500
Anish Kapoor: Memory
October 21, 2009-March 28, 2010

Memory (2008), a major new site-specific sculpture installation by leading international artist Anish Kapoor, is the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s first collaboration with the artist, who is celebrated for his expansive and profound aesthetic vision. The work is he 14th in a series of artist projects commissioned by Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin.

Since the late 1970s, Kapoor has extended the scope and language of contemporary sculpture through his explorations of scale, color, and the concept of the void. Constructed of Cor-Ten steel — a new material for the artist —Memory is a milestone for Kapoor. The work is composed of 154 Cor-Ten steel tiles, measures 14.5 x 8.97 x 4.48 meters overall, and weighs 24 tons. Its form nearly fills the gallery it occupies, challenging and altering the museum’s architecture through its improbable scale and proportions. The title, Memory, alludes to how visitors encounter the work, which can never be seen in its entirety and remains largely hidden from view.

This exhibition is made possible by Deutsche Bank.

Additional support is provided by the International Director’s Council of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Anish Kapoor: Memory was initiated in 2006 by Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and is curated by Sandhini Poddar, Assistant Curator of Asian Art. In early 2007, Kapoor was invited to create a site-specific work capable of engaging two very different exhibition locations: the Deutsche Guggenheim, where the work debuted in November 2008, and the Guggenheim Museum. “The Guggenheim Museum is delighted to present Anish Kapoor’s Memory in New York in our Deutsche Bank series of commissioned works by leading contemporary artists,” remarked Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum. “This show is presented as part of the museum’s 50th Anniversary program, and underscores our commitment to the importance of working with living artists,” continued Armstrong.

Kapoor’s earlier large-scale site-specific installations, such as Taratantara (1999), Marsyas (2002), and Svayambh (2007), succeeded in creating new perceptions of space through their distortions of scale. Continuing these types of distortions, Memory’s enormous scale prevents viewers from perceiving a gestalt. The work divides the gallery space into several distinct viewing areas, which can be approached either from the museum ramps, elevator banks, or the adjacent gallery. Visitors to the Guggenheim Museum are compelled to navigate different sections of the building as each vantage point offers only a glimpse of either the sculpture’s exterior form or its interior shell. This processional method of viewing the sculpture is an intrinsic aspect of the work. Kapoor asks visitors to connect and construct the fragmented images of Memory retained in their minds and thus exert more effort in their acts of seeing. Kapoor calls this process creating a “mental sculpture.”

As a 24-ton volume of Cor-Ten steel, Memory is vast, ineffable, raw, and industrial. Compressed into one of the Guggenheim Museum’s annex galleries, the sculpture’s sheer volume is foreboding, as its peripheries glance against the gallery walls and ceiling with the utmost precision. From within, Memory’s seamless eight-millimeter-thick steel tiles, meticulously manufactured to ensure absolute darkness inside, read as one continuous form. Viewable only through a two-square-meter aperture, these seamless tiles create the boundless void of Memory’s cavernous interior. Kapoor has created a sculpture whose interior space seems much more vast than that defined by its exterior form. A staircase leading from the adjacent gallery offers a view through the aperture. The precise wedging of this hole into the gallery wall defines a flat, two-dimensional plane that, from a certain distance, appears as a painting rather than an opening. Kapoor’s interest in this pictorial effect is best reflected in his frequently quoted statement, “I am a painter working as a sculptor.”

This new commission was engineered by Aerotrope Limited and manufactured by Centraalstaal B.V. in Groningen, Netherlands.

Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, and currently lives and works in London. Kapoor has exhibited extensively both internationally and in London; his solo shows have included venues such as the Kunsthalle Basel; Tate Modern, London; Hayward Gallery, London; Museo national centro de arte Reina Sofia, Palacio de Velázquez, Madrid; CAPC Museé d’art contemporain, Bordeaux, France; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and MAK–Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst/Gegenwartskunst, Vienna. He represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale and was awarded its Premio Duemila prize. He was the recipient of the prestigious Turner Prize, awarded in 1991. He has undertaken a number of major large-scale installations and commissions, including Taratantara (BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England, 1999, and Piazza del Plebicito, Naples, 2000-01), Marsyas (Tate Modern, London, 2002-03), Cloud Gate (Millennium Park, Chicago, 2004-present), Sky Mirror (Rockefeller Center, New York, 2006) and Svayambh (Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2007-08). Kapoor also has a major solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in fall 2009.

The accompanying exhibition catalogue offers in-depth analyses of Kapoor’s creative intellectual process and documents Memory’s development from the initial models to its final form at the Deustche Guggenheim and the Guggenheim Museum. The richly illustrated publication features a comprehensive exhibition history and bibliography, and provides a broad critical framework with multidisciplinary essays by Henri Lustiger-Thaler, Professor of Cultural Sociology, Ramapo College; Poddar; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, university professor and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University; Steven Holl, Principal of Steven Holl Architects, with David van der Leer, Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Christopher Hornzee-Jones, Director, Aerotrope Limited. Priced at $45 (hardcover), the exhibition catalogue Anish Kapoor: Memory can be purchased at the Guggenheim Store or at the Online Store at guggenheimstore.org.

Portrait of Anish Kapoor, Photo: Phillipe Chancel, 2007.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Grey Blue & Black – Pink Circle, 1929, Oil on canvas , 36 x 48", Dallas Museum of Art, Gift of The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Sky Above Clouds III/Above the Clouds III, 1963, Oil on canvas , 48 x 84", Private Collection, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Spring, 1922, Oil on canvas , 35-1/2 x 30-3/8, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, Bequest of Mrs. Arthur Schwab (Edna Bryner, class of 1907), © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Red & Orange Streak, 1919, Oil on canvas , 27 x 23", Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of Georgia O’Keeffe for the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987, Photograph by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Abstraction White Rose, 1927, Oil on canvas , 36 x 30", Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Gift, The Burnett Foundation and The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait, 1918, Gelatin silver print , 9-1/2 x 7-3/4", The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 93.XM.25.32, © J. Paul Getty Trust.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Series I, No. 4, 1918, Oil on canvas , 20 x 16", Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Gift of The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Series I, No. 8, 1919, Oil on canvas , 20 x 16", Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Gift of The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Untitled (Abstraction/Portrait of Paul Strand), 1917, Watercolor on paper , 12 x 8-7/8", Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Gift, The Burnett Foundation, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue
New York
212-423-3500
Peter Norton Family Galleries,
third floor
Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction
September 17, 2009-
January 17, 2010

The artistic achievement of Georgia O’Keeffe is freshly examined in Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction. While O’Keeffe (1887-1986) has long been recognized as one a central figure in 20th-century art, the radical abstract work she created throughout her long career has remained less well-known than her representational art. By surveying her abstractions, Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction repositions O’Keeffe as one of America's first and most daring abstract artists.

Including more than 130 paintings, drawings, watercolors, and sculptures by O'Keeffe as well as selected examples of Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photographic portrait series of O’Keeffe, the exhibition has been many years in the making. The curatorial team, led by Whitney curator Barbara Haskell, includes Barbara Buhler Lynes, the curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Emily Fisher Landau Director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center; Bruce Robertson, professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Elizabeth Hutton Turner, professor and vice provost for the arts at the University of Virginia and guest curator at The Phillips Collection; and Sasha Nicholas, Whitney curatorial assistant. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by the organizers, selections from the recently unsealed Stieglitz-O’Keeffe correspondence, and a contextual chronology of O’Keeffe’s life and work. Following its Whitney debut, the show travels to The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., February 6-May 9, 2010, and to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, May 28-September 12, 2010.

While it is true that O’Keeffe has entered the public imagination as a painter of sensual, feminine subjects, she is nevertheless viewed first and foremost as a painter of places and things. When one thinks of her work it is usually of her magnified images of open flowers and her iconic depictions of animal bones, her Lake George landscapes, her images of stark New Mexican cliffs, and her still lifes of fruit, leaves, shells, rocks, and bones. Even O’Keeffe’s canvasses of architecture, from the skyscrapers of Manhattan to the adobe structures of Abiquiu, come to mind more readily than the numerous works — made throughout her career — that she termed abstract.

This exhibition is the first to examine O'Keeffe's achievement as an abstract artist. In 1915, O'Keeffe leaped into the forefront of American modernism with a group of abstract charcoal drawings that were among the most radical creations produced in the United States at that time. A year later, she added color to her repertoire; by 1918, she was expressing the union of abstract form and color in paint. First exhibited in 1923, O’Keeffe’s psychologically charged, brilliantly colored abstract oils garnered immediate critical and public acclaim. For the next decade, abstraction would dominate her attention. Even after 1930, when O’Keeffe’s focus turned increasingly to representational subjects, she never abandoned abstraction, which remained the guiding principle of her art. She returned to abstraction in the mid-1940s with a new, planar vocabulary that provided a precedent for a younger generation of abstractionists.

Abstraction and representation for O’Keeffe were neither binary nor oppositional. She moved freely from one to the other, cognizant that all art is rooted in an underlying abstract formal invention. For O’Keeffe, abstraction offered a way to communicate ineffable thoughts and sensations. As she said in 1976, “The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.” Through her personal language of abstraction, she sought to give visual form (as she confided in a 1916 letter to Alfred Stieglitz) to “things I feel and want to say - [but] havent [sic] words for.” Abstraction allowed her to express intangible experience—be it a quality of light, color, sound, or response to a person or place. As O’Keeffe defined it in 1923, her goal as a painter was to “make the unknown — known. By unknown I mean the thing that means so much to the person that he wants to put it down — clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand.”

This exhibition and catalogue chronicle the trajectory of O'Keeffe's career as an abstract artist, examining the forces impacting the changes in subject matter and style. From her career's start, she was, as critic Henry McBride remarked, “a newspaper personality.” Interpretations of her art were shaped almost exclusively by Alfred Stieglitz, artist, charismatic impresario, dealer, editor, and O’Keeffe’s eventual husband, who presented her work from 1916 to 1946 in the groundbreaking galleries “291”, Anderson Galleries, Intimate Gallery, and An American Place. Stieglitz’s public and private statements about O’Keeffe’s early abstractions and the photographs he took of her, partially clothed or nude, led critics to interpret her work — to her great dismay — as Freudian-tinged, psychological expressions of her sexuality.

Cognizant of the public’s lack of sympathy for abstraction and seeking to direct the critics away from sexualized readings of her work, O’Keeffe self-consciously began to introduce more recognizable images into her repertoire in the mid-1920s. As she wrote to the writer Sherwood Anderson in 1924, “I suppose the reason I got down to an effort to be objective is that I didn’t like the interpretations of my other things [abstractions].” O’Keeffe’s increasing shift to representational subjects, coupled with Stieglitz’s penchant for favoring the exhibition of new, previously unseen work, meant that O’Keeffe’s abstractions rarely figured in the exhibitions Stieglitz mounted of her work after 1930, with the result that her first forays into abstraction virtually disappeared from public view.

In addition to rethinking O'Keeffe's place in American modernism, the book that accompanies thisexhibition reappraises the origin and singular character of her abstract vocabulary and the stylistic shifts which her art underwent over the span of her long career. It adds significant new insight into her art and life, publishing for the first time excerpts of recently unsealed letters written by O’Keeffe to photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, whom she married in 1924. These letters, along with a contextual chronology and other primary documents referenced by the authors, offer an intimate glimpse into her creative method and intentions as an artist.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Early Abstraction, 1915, Charcoal on paper , 24 x 18-5/8", Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Jane Bradley Pettit Foundation and The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation , M1997.189, © Milwaukee Art Museum, Photography by Malcolm Varon.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Jack-in-Pulpit Abstraction – No. 5, 1930, Oil on canvas , 48 x 30", National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest of Georgia O’Keeffe, 1987.58.4, Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Black White and Blue, 1930, Oil on canvas , 48 x 30", Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Abstraction, 1926, Oil on canvas , 30-1/4 x 18-1/16", Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 58.43, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. VI, 1930, Oil on canvas , 36 x 18", National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest of Georgia O’Keeffe, 1987.58.5, Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Pink Tulip, 1925, Oil on canvas , 31-3/4 x 12", Collection of Emily Fisher Landau, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Black Door with Red, 1954, Oil on canvas , 48 x 84", Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, Bequest of Walter P. Chrysler Jr., 89.63, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Vasily Kandinsky, Black Lines (Schwarze Linien), December 1913, Oil on canvas, 51 x 51 5/8", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift.

Vasily Kandinsky, Composition 8 (Komposition 8), July 1923, Oil on canvas, 55 1/8 x 79 1/8", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift.

Vasily Kandinsky, Dominant Curve (Courbe dominante), April 1936, Oil on canvas, 50 7/8 x 76 1/2", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection.

Vasily Kandinsky, Impression V (Park), March 1911 Oil on canvas, 106 x 157.5 cm, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Gift of Nina Kandinsky, 1976, © 2009 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, Photo: Bertrand Prévost, courtesy Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris, diffusion RMN.

Irene Guggenheim, Vasily Kandinsky, Hilla Rebay, and Solomon R. Guggenheim, Dessau, July 1930, Hilla von Rebay Foundation Archive. M0007, Photograph by Nina Kandinsky, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York.

Vasily Kandinsky, Various Parts (Parties diverses), February 1940. Oil on canvas, 89 x 116 cm, Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung, Munich, on deposit at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, © 2009 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, Photo: Courtesy Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung, Munich.

Vasily Kandinsky, Colorful Life (Motley Life) (Das bunte Leben), 1907, Tempera on canvas, 130 x 162.5 cm, Bayerische Landesbank, on permanent loan to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, © 2009 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, Photo: Courtesy Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

Vasily Kandinsky, In the Black Square (Im schwarzen Viereck), June 1923, Oil on canvas, 38 3/8 x 36 5/8", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift.

Vasily Kandinsky, Blue Mountain (Der blaue Berg), 1908-09, Oil on canvas, 41-3/4 x 38", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift.

Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue
New York
212-423-3500
Kandinsky
September 18, 2009-
January 13, 2010

Kandinsky, a full-scale retrospective of the paintings of Vasily Kandinsky — the visionary artist, theorist, and pioneer of abstraction — comprising nearly 100 of Kandinsky’s most important canvases from 1907 to 1942 is drawn primarily from the three largest repositories of the artist’s work — the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau in Munich — as well as from significant private and public collections. Complemented by more than 60 works on paper from the collections of the Guggenheim and Hilla von Rebay foundations, this retrospective traces the painter’s oeuvre, focusing on the key events that informed his life and work. Marked by two world wars and the Russian revolutions, Kandinsky’s abstraction did not develop in detachment or isolation. Kandinsky, the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s career in the United States since the three surveys mounted by the Guggenheim Museum in the 1980s, reveals the complex background to his aesthetic innovations.

This exhibition is organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, in cooperation with the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Generous support is provided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal agency; and Baibakov Art Projects. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

The exhibition was shown earlier this year at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, and the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, before its presentation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

The unprecedented collaborative efforts of the three museums have allowed this exhibition to include examples from Kandinsky’s Improvisations, Impressions, and Compositions series, and to demonstrate the artist’s formal and conceptual contributions to the course of abstraction in the 20th-century. Kandinsky features works that have rarely traveled, such as the Lenbachhaus’s early masterpiece Colorful Life (Motley Life) (Das bunte Leben, 1907), and the Guggenheim Museum’s Light Picture (Helles Bild, December, 1913) — a seminal work among the first of Kandinsky’s truly abstract canvases that has not been exhibited in the museum’s own galleries since the 1970s — offering new contexts and comparisons for all the works.

Under the care and preparation of the Guggenheim’s conservation department, three canvases considered extremely delicate due to the artist’s use of sand as well as paint, traveled for the first time in decades to the other venues. Significant loans from institutions such as Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Russia, as well as the Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi, will introduce works rarely or never seen in the United States.

The survey traces Kandinsky’s thematic motifs, such as the horse and rider, mountainous landscapes, tumultuous seascapes, apocalyptic imagery, and other sacred subject-matter references, and follows the artist’s painted realizations of his well-developed aesthetic theories, allowing a reexamination of the geographical- and time-based periods traditionally applied to his oeuvre.Kandinsky is curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Christian Derouet, Curator at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Annegret Hoberg, Curator at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Karole Vail, Assistant Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, assisted with the organization of the New York presentation.

Kandinsky was a central figure in the history and genesis of the Guggenheim Museum, and this landmark exhibition fittingly coincides with the museum’s 50th anniversary year. The museum’s founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim, started acquiring works by Kandinsky in 1929 on the counsel of Hilla Rebay, who was to become the museum’s first director and who advocated collecting works by Kandinsky in all mediums and from all periods. Guggenheim paid an historic visit to the artist’s studio at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, in 1930, and over the course of his lifetime ultimately purchased more than 150 Kandinsky paintings. Guggenheim soon became the champion of a particular brand of abstraction known as nonobjective art, which had no ties to the empirical world and aspired to spiritual and utopian goals. His enthusiasm eventually led to the opening of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939, the direct precursor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Permanent galleries were devoted to Kandinsky from the museum’s inception, a practice the Guggenheim Museum has revived in recent years. In 1945, shortly after the artist’s death in Paris, Rebay organized a memorial exhibition at the museum and translated some of his influential writings into English.

Vasily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow; d. 1944, Paris) was one of the pioneers of abstraction and great theorists of modernism. He was born in Moscow to an affluent family and initially studied law and economics at the University of Moscow, but at age 30 he left Russia to study painting in Munich. With his companion, artist Gabriele Münter, he traveled throughout Europe, spending time in Amsterdam, Palermo, Rome, Vienna, and other cities, as well as Carthage and Kairouan in Tunisia. In 1906, he and Münter settled briefly in Paris, returning in 1908 to Munich where Kandinsky began a period of intense activity — painting and organizing artistic associations and exhibitions.

Kandinsky published his first major theoretical writing Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Insbesondere in der Malerei (On the Spiritual in Art: And Painting in Particular), in December 1911 (dated 1912). In it he explores connections between Theosophical thought and form and color in painting, considers the potential of music to express inner feelings and ideas, and identifies three types of paintings designated by titles associated with music:Impressions, which are based on real-life subjects; Improvisations, which are spontaneous and unconscious images from the artist’s inner life; and Compositions, which are formally developed works often preceded by a series of studies. Stimulated by contact from vanguard musicians and artists, including Arnold Schönberg and Franz Marc, Kandinsky painted prolifically, gradually leaving figuration behind. The outbreak of war brought an abrupt end to this highly creative early period, as he was forced to leave Germany and return to Moscow in 1914. After the Russian Revolution, he worked alongside Kazimir Malevich, Liubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, and other Suprematist and Constructivist artists, though he opposed the geometry of their “pure” art. In 1921, he returned to Germany with his wife Nina, whom he had married in 1917.

In 1922, Kandinsky accepts an offer from architect Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus, a school of art, architecture, and design in Weimar dedicated to establishing a modern aesthetic. While teaching the Preliminary Course and Wall Painting Workshop, Kandinsky reconnected with Paul Klee, an artist with whom he shared ideas regarding the correlation between the spiritual and art. His painting was also influenced by the rationalist inclinations of the Bauhaus and the systematization of ideas he then imposed on his own teaching. His formal vocabulary and palette simplified as he explored compositions based on geometry. Kandinsky completed his second aesthetic treatise Punkt und Linie zu Fläche. Beitrag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente (Point and Line to Plane: A Contribution to the Analysis of Pictorial Elements) in 1926. The Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close in 1933 and the rise of National Socialism led Kandinsky to abandon Germany a second time.

In December 1933, Kandinsky and his wife Nina settled in a suburb of Paris. Despite a certain degree of isolation, Kandinsky succeeded in showing his work and connecting with a younger generation of artists. At a time when German authorities confiscated his work and declared it “degenerate art,” Kandinsky exhibited in Paris and continued to cultivate an American audience through his connections with Katherine Dreier, Hilla Rebay, Galka Scheyer, and other collectors. His formal vocabulary changed, featuring a softer palette and biomorphic forms, informed by his contact with artists Joan Miró and Jean Arp, Surrealism in general, and his interest in the natural sciences. After 1942, Kandinsky, restricted by a shortage of canvas, continued to create small paintings and works on paper. He died at home in 1944.

An illustrated 320-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition, and contains five comprehensive art historical texts and a conservation study of Kandinsky’s work. The contributors to the catalogue are Vivian Endicott Barnett, art historian and Kandinsky scholar; Tracey Bashkoff, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Christian Derouet, Curator at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Matthias Haldemann, Director, Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland; Annegret Hoberg, Curator at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; and Gillian McMillan, Senior Conservator, Collections, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The catalogue also features an extensive illustrated chronology compiled by Hoberg, as well as a selected bibliography. Priced at $55 for the hardcover and $35 for the softcover, the exhibition catalogue Kandinsky can be purchased at the Guggenheim Store or at the online store at guggenheimstore.com.

Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version) (Improvisation 28 [zweite Fassung]), 1912, Oil on canvas, 43 7/8 x 63 7/8", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift.

Vasily Kandinsky, Small Pleasures (Kleine Freuden), June 1913, Oil on canvas, 43 1/4 x 47 1/8", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection.