Kandinsky in Paris

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...