Kandinsky Gallery

Exhibition Website

Jul 1 2015 - Apr 3 2016

Guggenheim Museum

New York City, NY

A pioneer of abstract art and eminent aesthetic theorist, Vasily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow; d. 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) broke new ground in painting during the first decades of the twentieth century. His seminal treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), published in Munich in December 1911, lays out his program for developing an art independent from observations of the external world. In this and other texts, as well as his work, Kandinsky advanced abstraction’s potential to be free from nature, a quality of music that he admired. The development of a new subject matter based solely on the artist’s “inner necessity” would occupy him for the rest of his life.

Perhaps more than any other twentieth-century painter, Kandinsky has been linked to the history of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Hilla Rebay, artist, art advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim, and the institution’s first director, promoted nonobjective painting above all other forms of abstraction. She was particularly inspired by Kandinsky. (...)  While Guggenheim particularly appreciated Kandinsky’s Bauhaus works, Rebay encouraged him to collect his work in-depth, across various media and from different periods. As a result of this discerning guidance, the Guggenheim collection, established with Solomon's private holdings in 1937, now contains more than 150 works by this single artist.

This presentation of seven select canvases from the Guggenheim collection traces Kandinsky’s aesthetic evolution: his early beginnings in Munich at the start of the century, the return to his native Moscow with the outbreak of World War I, his interwar years in Germany as a teacher at the Bauhaus, and his final chapter in Paris.

Credit: Exhibition Overview from the The Guggenheim Museum website


Whether you go or not, in his "seminal treatise"  Concerning the Spiritual in Art, mentioned above, Kandinsky argues for the transcendental importance of his vocation.

  • Painting
  • European
  • 20th Century
  • abstract
  • Vasily Kandinsky

Exhibition Venues & Dates