Art: Preparing for Abstraction

In New York, the first of a Kandinsky trilogy

The Russian artist Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) casts a long shadow over modern art. His career took him to most of its centers: Munich before World War I, Russia, and next a long sojourn at the Bauhaus in Germany during the 1920s, then a last expatriation to Paris after the rise of Hitler. If ever a painter carried his culture in one portable labyrinth on his back, as if he were a rambling snail, it was Kandinsky. And while he did not invent abstract art on his own (as he and his admirers were given to claim), he certainly did more to promote the notion of ideal abstraction, in those distant years before World War I, than any other European artist.

Such a life, woven through so many cultural milieus, is not easily condensed into one retrospective show. The Guggenheim Museum in New York has set out to describe it in three parts, the first of which, "Kandinsky in Munich: 1896-1914," is now on view. It is focused, not exclusively on the text of Kandinsky's own paintings, but on their context as well. What did he see in Munich? What did he get from other artists' work? The exhibition, closely and intelligently curated by Art Historian Peg Weiss, is therefore largely about the Jugendstil, or youth-style—the art-nouveau porridge of medievalism, forest fantasies, greenery-yallery decor and arts-and-crafts utilitarianism that was cooking in the Munich studios when Kandinsky made his late start as a 30-year-old art student therein 1896.

Later exhibitions will deal with Kandinsky at the Bauhaus and in Paris. By 1985, presumably, the Guggenheim Museum will have fulfilled its destiny as the St. Peter's of Kandinsky studies. That is fitting enough, since the museum is (so to speak) built over the ruins of a shrine that housed his cult in the 1940s. This was the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, set up and run by Solomon Guggenheim's mistress, the Baroness Hilla Rebay, who—in her dottily hierophantic devotion to the Great Artist, not to mention her purported Nazi sympathies—was for a time the Winifred Wagner of the New York art world. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, complete with piped-in organ music, was devoted to the baroness's idea that Kandinsky was the messiah, sent to save all culture, with Paul Klee as his attendant apostle.

The idea that such a transcendent being might have had a context would have been anathema to the baroness, but her collection became the core of the Guggenheim Museum. Meanwhile, the blazing torch of devotion has turned into a curatorial flashlight, poking abruptly here and there amid the somewhat musty recesses of the Jugendstil. Such are the sorrows of no longer believing that art and religion are the same thing.