Like most people, I have the best
intentions. And, like most people, there are times in which those intentions
don't always get accomplished. Like this blog post. I had every
intention of sitting down and writing it within a week of returning from our
visit to New York City at the end of
March... and, here we are, at the end
of AUGUST, and it is just getting posted… and, quite frankly, I am
not quite sure why it was not completed in the first place.
I will admit to toying with the
idea of simply deleting this draft, but I absolutely HATE having things only
half done, so I decided that since what I most want to talk about was our visit
to the Kandinsky Gallery at the Guggenheim Museum and that although the
Kandinskys we went to see are currently not in said Gallery, the experience and
the trip itself is still worth writing about.
The
New York City trip was, for me, long overdue. I enjoy NYC, but in small doses,
so there has to be a reason for going there... Something
there worth making the trip... and, there it was: an advertisement in a
national art magazine last fall announcing that the Guggenheim Museum would
have seven Vasily Kandinsky paintings on view in the Kandinsky Galley until the
Spring (yeah, pretty vague, I know). The paintings would trace 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".
I should also state
that I am a Frank Lloyd Wright fan and I had never had an opportunity to visit
the Guggenheim Museum, so this was technically a fan-girl double-bill for me. I
only wish that I had a chance to see it in better weather – we visited on a
dark, raw, drizzling morning… and it was PACKED, the queue snaked around the
building waiting to get in when we arrived shortly after the museum opened.
We chose to start in
the spiral and decided to start at the top and work our way down to the
Kandinsky Gallery. The galleries located in the spiral are a creative use of
space, and as much as I wanted to slow down and take in all that was on view,
what I really wanted was to head directly to the Kandinsky Gallery.
The Kandinsky Gallery
was pretty much wall-to-wall people. The Gallery is small, there really isn’t a
lot of room to walk around and view the work as I would have liked and, to top
it off, a small group of grade school children were doing EXACTLY what I wanted
to be doing: sitting on the gallery floor, enjoying the paintings and creating
a collaborative piece of art based on Kandinsky’s geometric designs.
One of the pleasures of viewing art in person as opposed to on-line is that you can get relatively close to the work and study how it was created: the brush strokes, the thickness of the paint, the weave of the canvas, and how all these elements work together to create these amazing pieces of art. So, what I thought I would do to illustrate this is to have a picture of the original work and a picture I took of a detail of the work side-by-side:
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| "Small Pleasures" |
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| "Small Pleasures", detail |
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| "Blue Mountain", detail |
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| "Blue Mountain" |
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| "Black Lines", detail |
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| "Black Lines" |
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| "Several Circles", detail |
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| "Several Circles" |
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| "Various Actions", detail |
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| "Various Actions" |
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| "Circles in Black" detail |
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| "Circles in Black" |
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| "Improvisation 28 2nd version", detail |
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| "Improvisation 28 2nd version" |
As much
as I enjoyed seeing the progression of Kandinsky's work, I am most partial to
works like "Improvisation 28 2nd version" which was painted in 1912.
I am especially attracted to Kandinsky's idea of "painting music" and
how different instruments and tones have their own unique shape and color. The
evolution of this personal language is intriguing and something that I have
been researching on my own for many years now.
I'm happy that I had an opportunity see the seven Kandinsky's, but I
will admit that there is a part of me that wishes that there had been more. The
Guggenheim Museum has a collection of "more than one hundred and
fifty" of Kandinsky's work. December 4, 2016 will mark Kandinsky's 150th
birthday and I am hoping that somewhere, someone is planning a celebration show
for him. I have a vision of ALL of the Guggenheim's Kandinsky's out for one
blockbuster show, the entire museum showing just Kandinskys. Now, that would
make me drive into NYC again :)
"Color provokes a psychic
vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part
of the human body." - Vasily Kandinsky
Jenn White
White Rooster Studio
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