Kandinsky

New York City

Kandinsky certainly is a household name, but it seems as if his liaison with Bauhaus is fameless. For that reason, the Guggenheim Museum New York currently showases Kandinsky at the Bauhaus, 1922–1933, an exhibition that presents the co-evolvement of Kandinsky and Bauhaus.

In 1922 Vasily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow; d. 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) accepted a teaching position at the Bauhaus, the state-sponsored Weimar school of art and applied design founded in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius. The school’s curriculum was based on the principle that the crafts were equal to the traditional arts and was organized according to a medieval-style guild system of training under the tutelage of masters. Kandinsky conducted the Wall Painting Workshop and Preliminary Course and taught at all three of the school’s sequential locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin until 1933, when the Bauhaus was closed due to pressure from the National Socialist (Nazi) government.

Geometric shapes came to play a dominant role in Kandinsky’s pictorial vocabulary at the Bauhaus; the artist, who was interested in uncovering a universal aesthetic language, increased his use of overlapping, flat planes and clearly delineated forms. This change was due, in part, to his familiarity with the Suprematist work of Kazimir Malevich and the art of the Constructivists. Kandinsky’s turn toward geometric forms was also likely a testament to the influence of industry and developments in technology.

Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, this intimate presentation features paintings and works on paper from a prolific period of Kandinsky’s career.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York

Ongoing
1071 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10128
USA

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