Friday, Sep. 04, 2009
Kandinsky
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City; Sept. 18
It's not true that he invented abstract painting. But in the first half of the 20th century, Vasily Kandinsky, whose career took him from his native Russia to Munich, the Bauhaus and Paris, was surely abstraction's most tireless evangelist, a man committed to exploring the ways paint could represent the immaterial world of spirit he had discovered in the works of the mystic Madame Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy. Blavatsky was a crank, but you don't have to believe a word she wrote to find Kandinsky's plumes of color heavenly.