NEW YORK.- Welcome to Kandinsky, a major exhibition celebrating the extraordinary art of Vasily Kandinsky, organised by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

As one of the most adored artists of the 20th century, Kandinsky’s revolutionary approach to visual expression – involving a profound exploration of the interplay between colour, form and the human spirit – has captivated generations. Our deep appreciation goes to Richard Armstrong, the former director of the Guggenheim Museum, for allowing so many treasures from their collection to come to Sydney, and to deputy director and chief curator Naomi Beckwith for her continuing support. Our great thanks also go to Megan Fontanella, the Guggenheim Museum curator of modern art and provenance, for her outstanding curation of this exhibition.

Kandinsky forms part of the Sydney International Art Series, and we acknowledge the support of the NSW Government through Destination NSW and the Create NSW Blockbusters Funding initiative in enabling us to stage such outstanding international exhibitions in Sydney.

As part of the exhibition, you can experience a music program that underlines the important relationship Kandinsky had with music, as well as a specially commissioned artist project by Desmond Lazaro that draws inspiration from Kandinsky’s ideas to form an immersive and wondrous experience for all ages. Thank you for visiting – I hope you greatly enjoy Kandinsky’s art and his transformative vision that continues to inspire the world. Michael Brand, Director. Art Gallery of New South Wales

On behalf of the NSW Government, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the Sydney International Art Series exhibition Kandinsky.

Vasily Kandinsky was one of the most influential European artists during the most tumultuous period in the 20th century. Against the backdrop of social and political upheaval, Kandinsky contributed to an overhaul of how painters conceived form and applied colour. This comprehensive exhibition has been curated with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, drawing on their significant holdings of this important modernist’s work. Kandinsky brings together a collection of exceptional works from abroad and presents them to Australian audiences and visitors.

This collaboration has been supported by the NSW Government through the Create NSW Blockbusters Funding initiative and its tourism and major events agency Destination NSW. Kandinsky is presented as part of the Sydney International Art Series, along with Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day? in the Art Gallery’s North Building.

Showcasing the life and work of one of the most influential and best-loved European modernists

Vasily Kandinsky (Russia/France 1866–1944) is recognised as a major artistic innovator and painting theorist. In the opening decades of the 20th century, he was among those who advanced nonrepresentational modes of art- making to lasting effect. The artist’s stylistic evolution in this regard was intimately tied to his sense of place and the communities with which he engaged. Kandinsky gained insight from his meaningful interactions with an array of artists, musicians, poets, and other cultural producers, especially those who shared his transnational vision and experimental bent.Uprooted time and again, he adapted with his every relocation across Germany, back to Russia, and eventually to France – all against the backdrop of the socio-political upheavals occurring around him.




Kandinsky’s earliest paintings were made while he was living in or around Munich from 1896 to 1914. There he participated in heightened vanguard activity across multiple disciplines, fluidly moving between painting, poetry and stage composition. In time he interrogated the expressive possibilities of colour, line and form, inspired in part by contemporary music. The body of work from his decade teaching at the Bauhaus, a progressive German school that promoted a synthesis of the arts, manifests Kandinsky’s conviction that art could transform self and society. It exemplifies the revitalisation of his abstract style following direct contact with the avant-garde in Russia in the late 1910s.

This, what Kandinsky called the artist’s ‘inner necessity’, remained the guiding principle through the periodic redefinitions of his life and work.

This exhibition is drawn from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s extensive Kandinsky collection in New York and is curated by the Guggenheim’s curator of modern art and provenance, Megan Fontanella. The paintings presented in this exhibition illuminate the journey of an artist who would not leave behind the precedents of representation or of his own early work altogether, even as he explored the transcendent potential of abstract forms. Kandinsky is proudly supported by the NSW Government through the Create NSW Blockbusters Funding initiative and by its tourism and major events agency, Destination NSW, as part of the Sydney International Art Series, bringing the world’s most outstanding exhibitions to Australia, exclusively to Sydney.

KEY FACTS

• Vasily (or Wassily) Kandinsky was born in 1866 in Moscow, Russia. He spent much of his youth in the Ukraine.

• Kandinsky studied law, national economics and statistics, graduating in 1893, before abandoning his PhD dissertation and taking up a position as artistic director of
a Moscow printing establishment. He only decided to study painting at the age of 30, relocating to Munich.

• Kandinsky was one of the key leaders in the development of abstraction or
‘non-objective’ painting where reference to the external visible world is removed.

• Kandinsky was a founding member of major artist groups including Phalanx (1901), the New Artists’ Association of Munich (NKVM) (1909) and the Blue Rider (1911).

• Kandinsky was a theorist and author of one of the most influential books of modern art, On the spiritual in art, published in 1911. A second influential follow-up text, Point and line to plane was published (by the Bauhaus) in 1926.

• Kandinsky taught at the progressive and profoundly influential modernist art school, the Bauhaus, from 1922 until its closure by the Nazi party in 1933.

• The artist had a fruitful and successful late period, working until 5 months before his death.

• Kandinsky died from a stroke at his home in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Paris) on 13 December 1944, aged 78.