Kandinsky’s Transformations

A new exhibition in Brussels traces Kandinsky’s legacy and places the artist’s development in context. Like his contemporaries, Kandinsky was fascinated by Russian folklore.

By Larisa Doctorow

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: March 20, 2013 (Issue # 1751)

for spt Kandinsky’s painting ‘St. George II,’ from 1911, borrows from the conventions of Russian icon painting.

One hundred years ago, in 1913, the work of Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky was first exhibited in Belgium at the recently-opened Georges Giroux Gallery in Brussels. It was the artist’s first experience of the Belgian capital, as well as being the first time the Belgian public had seen his art.

To commemorate that visit, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels has organized a monumental show of works by Kandinsky and his contemporaries for which the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg has provided most of the exhibits. Several important works have been loaned from other Russian museums, with Belgian, French and Swiss collections providing the remainder.

Perhaps the single most important and unexpected piece on display from outside Russia arrived just minutes before the opening. The artist’s “White Circle,” painted in 1911, and considered to be the first abstract work in the history of art, was loaned by the Tbilisi Art Museum.

Russian art is not particularly well-known in Belgium. Apart from icons and the odd work of art, there is little chance to see it in public museums. Private collections are a different matter, however, and many contain work by artists of the Russian avant-garde, alongside icons and work by contemporary Russian artists.

In 2005, the Belgian public had the opportunity to become acquainted with a wide spectrum of Russian art during Europalia, an art festival that is organized every two years in the Belgian capital. For that show the Russian Museum also loaned most of the works.

for spt Kandinsky’s ‘Murnau (Summer Landscape)’ points the way to abstraction.

The Kandinsky exhibition currently on view has been organized chronologically, and includes work from 1901 to 1922 — the year that Kandinsky left Russia and settled in Europe, first in Germany and then in France, where he died in 1944.

Opening the exhibition, Yevgenia Petrova, Deputy Director of the Russian Museum, explained the logic behind the exhibition.

“We tried to connect the art of Kandinsky with his life and to show the reflection of his life in his paintings. Thus, a great deal of attention is devoted to the sources of the painter’s inspiration, such as folk art, the cult of shamanism and the work of his contemporaries,” she said.

Of the over 150 items on display, Kandinsky is represented by 50 works; canvases and graphic works are placed alongside the folk objects costumes, traditional musical instruments and icons that inspired him and his contemporaries.

In 1897 Kandinsky traveled to Germany and spent several years near Munich. There he founded a number of artistic societies, the most influential being The Blue Rider. At that time he was fascinated by traditional German reverse-painting on glass, which reminded him of Russian folk scenes, and he created a number of works in that style. They are well represented at the exhibition and also come from the Russian Museum.

for spt Malevich’s Suprematism offers a different view of Russian abstraction. for

Kandinsky’s works are also accompanied by a display of pieces by his contemporaries: Mikhail Vrubel, Nicholas Roerich, Nikolai Kul’bin, Ivan Bilibin, Natalia Goncharova, Alexej von Jawlensky, David Burliuk and his German colleagues from The Blue Rider.

Kandinsky himself was a successful attorney before he became a painter, and his work is highly intellectual. In planning the current exhibition, the curators chose to provide newcomers to Kandinsky’s art with extracts from his seminal work “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” which was published in 1911.

To foreground this important aspect of Kandinsky’s work, visitors to the exhibition are presented with the interior of a Russian izba , a traditional Russian countryside dwelling, in which a corner was customarily decorated with icons and embroidered towels. Kandinsky considered the izba to be a spiritual space one needed to enter in order to purify the soul.

The thoughtful way in which the works in the exhibition are presented offers visitors a chance to draw parallels between the different artists, and between the objects that inspired the artist and his paintings.

The massive “St George II,” for example, is set alongside an icon of the same saint and allows viewers to see how closely Kandinsky followed the conventions of icon painting. In spite of its abstraction Kandinsky’s oil painting shows a knight, a dragon, a sword, as well as expressing the mood of the battle and the final victory.

for spt A 16th-century icon from the exhibition.

Like his contemporaries, Kandinsky was fascinated by Russian folklore. He collected it, studied it and borrowed some of its features for his own work. Fairy-tale elements, naïveté and a luminous brightness are obvious in several of his smaller paintings. In their color scheme they resemble the decorated spinning wheels exhibited in the same gallery.

Shamanism also exerted an strong influence on Kandinsky, and the show contains an engraving in which the painter juxtaposed trees and wooden totems. This itself is juxtaposed with a vitrine containing four similar idols.

The traditional Russian musical instruments on display have been loaned by the Brussels Museum of Music Instruments, and several of the exquisite icons included in the show come from the Brussels Museum of Fine Arts.

The exhibition also contains two notable canvases, one by Kandinsky and the other by Malevich. The two painters were involved in endless dialogue and dispute. Kandinsky’s “Composition on a White Background” depicts a set of small black squares set among bright abstract forms and church towers. In its own way, it is a citation of Malevich’s “Suprematist Composition,” which is hung on the opposite side of the gallery.

One of the features that distinguished Kandinsky from Malevich is the former’s musicality. That music played an important role is obvious even from the titles of the works, which often include the terms “fugue,” “composition” and “improvisation.” This very feature brought him into contact with the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg was also a very earnest painter and the two shared similar concerns. Four canvases by Schoenberg give viewers a chance to see how the composer tried to turn music into color and form.

Kandinsky frequently sought to express spirituality in his canvases through line, shape and color but without reference to physical objects. Because of this, visitors to the exhibition are invited by the artist to enter the universe that he created, and to negotiate a relationship with the works that is highly personal and intimate.

‘Kandinsky and Russia’ runs through June 30 at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium.