It is to be hoped that the Guggenheim Museum’s current offering, “Kandinsky in Munich,” will initiate a trend among those who compile art exhibitions, but not so much because of its subject. Kandinsky—the first artist to make the leap from representation to abstraction, thereby becoming a pivotal figure in twentieth century art—is something of an old story, especially at the Guggenheim, which, in its early days as The Museum of Non-Objective Art, practically cornered the Kandinsky market. Even so, this show—the first of three the Guggenheim will devote to him in the next two years—presents a youthful, experimenting Kandinsky who is largely unfamiliar to American audiences, and this alone makes it worth visiting.
What elevates the show into a possible trendsetter, however, is that it tries to explain Kandinsky’s development in terms of the historical and cultural environment of the formative years 1896 to 1914, when he lived and worked in Munich. Rather than adopting the usual formalist approach, which focuses the spectator’s attention exclusively on the artist and relegates information about the forces that helped mold him to the catalogue and an occasional label, this show features Kandinsky’s early paintings, as well as his woodcuts, jewelry, ceramics, and designs for dresses and embroidery. These are interspersed among related objects made by his teachers and his coevals, as well as documentation about Munich’s cultural life. The result is a truly three-dimensional view of the artist in his place and time, and a glimpse of a city whose role as an artistic catalyst in the halcyon years before World War I appears to have been nearly as crucial as that of Paris.
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