You may know his Blue Mountain but there’s much more to the impenetrable artist, says the curator of the Art Gallery of NSW show
Megan Fontanella, curator of modern art and provenance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum, New York, during a media preview of the Sydney International Art Series 2023-24 Kandinsky exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.Megan Fontanella, curator of modern art and provenance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum, New York, during a media preview of the Sydney International Art Series 2023-24 Kandinsky exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.
The Russian artist once deemed a dangerous “degenerate” by the Nazis hurtled from impressionism to expressionism to abstraction over four decades from 1896 until his death in 1944. He didn’t begin painting until he was 30, having been inspired by one of Monet’s haystack paintings, which showed him the dazzling possibilities of art. .
Kandinsky wrote long treatises about what certain symbols and colours meant to him, although the task of decoding what it all means feels almost silly when faced with one of his painting. Take the colour red – in his own words, it represents: “Strength, energy, purpose, striving, resistance, resoluteness, violence, passion, joy, triumph, high sound, and the penetrating call of fanfares mixed with tuba./Everything human.” Blue meant balance and purity. White: silence and possibility.
The rise of the Bauhaus movement, of which Kandinsky was part, coincided with the rise of the Nazis. The art school dodged increasingly conservative local governments in Weimar, Dessau and then Berlin, before being shut down in 1933. In 1937, the Nazis ordered that 57 Kandinsky paintings be removed from German museums; 14 of those were displayed in the Nazi’s famous exhibition in Munich.
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