Features April 1985
Kandinsky in Paris
On Kandinsky’s quest for the invisible.
The exhibition which Christian Derouet has organized at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum under the title, “Kandinsky in Paris: 1934-1944,” is the third and final installment in the retrospective series which the museum has devoted to this artist over a period of three years.[1] It differs, however, from its predecessors in one important respect. Unlike “Kandinsky in Munich: 1896-1914” and “Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years, 1915-1933,” the present exhibition does not come to us heavily laden with familiar historical associations. The artist of the Munich period is, of course, a celebrated figure—one of the inventors of abstract painting and the author of an important treatise on the subject, Concerning the Spiritual in Art; the founder of the Blaue Reiter group, and a recognized leader of the...
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