Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle · Guggenheim Museum
From October 8, 2021 to September 5, 2022, the Guggenheim Museum in New York presents the exhibition "Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle" in its iconic spiral rotunda.
Wassily Kandinsky - Landscape with Factory Chimney - 1910Wassily Kandinsky - Composition VIII - 1923
Source: Guggenheim Museum, New York. Images: Vasily Kandinsky, "Landscape with Factory Chimney" (Landschaft mit Fabrikschornstein), 1910. Oil on canvas, 26 × 32 1/4 inches (66 × 81.9 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York ·· Vasily Kandinsky, Composition 8 (Komposition 8), July 1923. Oil on canvas, 55 1/4 x 79 inches (140.3 x 200.7 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Although the title of “father of abstraction” has been assigned to several artists, from Pablo Picasso to J.M.W. Turner, few painters could claim it with as many reasons as Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Turner to Pablo Picasso, few painters could claim it as justly as Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), one of the essential artists for understanding 20th-century art. During the last years of his life, Kandinsky enjoyed enormous popularity among critics and collectors, including Solomon R. Guggenheim. As a result, today the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum holds one of the finest collections of works by the artist. Drawing from this excellent collection of works, "Around the Circle" presents approximately eighty paintings, watercolours and woodcuts, arranged along the iconic spiral rotunda of the New York museum.
The exhibition unfolds in chronologically reverse order, ascending the museum's spiral ramp. It begins with his purely abstract experiments from the last 20 years of his life, such as "Around the Circle", the 1940 work that gives the exhibition its title, or his complex "Composition 8" (1923). Virtually every stage of Kandinsky's career is represented in the exhibition. The second version of "Improvisation 28" (1912) and "Black Lines" (1913) represent the peak of Kandinsky's career, when the artist moved from expressionism to pure abstraction. Following the chronologically reverse order, the exhibition concludes with works of early Expressionism, still indebted to Fauvism, such as "Blue Mountain" (1908-09) or the excellent "Landscape with Factory Chimney" (1910).

Read the full article