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eCognoscente
recommends riding the elevator up at the Guggenheim (purists
insist that Wright's original intention was for viewers to ride up
and then stroll gently down to earth along the ramp, aided by
gravity) and take in the retrospective of the paintings of Vasily
Kandinsky (he of the Wassily
Chair,
the Guggenheim just prefers the alternate spelling).
Born
in Moscow in 1866, the Russian abstract painter Vasily Kandinsky
moved to Germany in 1896 to study art where he befriended the
composer Arnold Schoenberg, founded the Blue Rider (Der
Blaue Reiter) school of expressionistic painting with Franz
Marc, and taught art at the Bauhaus for many years until it was
closed by the Nazis. Kandinsky is one of the pioneers of
abstraction and early theorists of modernism in art. He
visualized the spiritual life of humanity as a triangle or
pyramid, the artist leading the way to the top or pinnacle.
In
1910, Kandinsky set down his thoughts in Concerning the
Spiritual in Art: And Painting in Particular, a classic of its
kind. In this thin volume, Kandinsky sees form and color as
purely transcendent. His ideas on color echo some of
Schoenberg's music theories, and he spoke of art in musical terms:
Painting
is the vast thunderous clash of many worlds... There is the
same vast and cataclysmic quality to that mighty symphony - the
Music of the Spheres.
He classified paintings based on music: Impressions,
Improvisations, and Compositions. Color
and form had to provoke an inner resonance, an emotional response,
one had to moved by the music of the painting! Art as an
ascending symphony, eliciting some answering vibration in the
heartstrings....
Riding
Couple, 1907,
Oil on canvas, Stadtische Gallery
The
horse and rider are a recurring motif in his work, an expression
of the journey toward abstraction, away from traditional
values. In The Blue Rider, an early painting of his
from 1903, one sees this influence of the Fauves and Gauguin,
everything is color, all impressions are expressed in emotional
hues, there is the distortion of figures and forms to elicit an
emotional resonance…. In Riding Couple (1907) entangled
lovers on a white horse, beautiful glistening stained-glass
patches of color, romantic, sexual love as one way towards the
spiritual in art. In Blue Mountain (1908-09),
expanses of deep yellow, red and blue depict a lively overflowing
nature, while in the foreground mounted horsemen on white steeds
gallop forward and upwards, alive in a world of magic color,
pointillist daubs of paint.
Blue
Mountain, 1908–09, Oil on canvas, Guggenheim Museum
So
we say, take Wright's beautiful steed of an elevator up for a ride
and get closer to the spiritual, right here in NYC!
See:
Kandinsky
@ The Guggenheim Read:
Kandinsky,
ed. by Tracey Bashkoff, the accompanying catalogue
to the exhibition
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