Retrospective in the Round

The current retrospective show at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum is the meeting ground for the ideas of three dead giants: Solomon Guggenheim, the copper-tycoon tastemaker; Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect; and Vasily Kandinsky, the father of abstract expressionism. For patrons making the spiral descent into the museum's terrazzo maelstrom to view the largest collection of Kandinsky oils and watercolors ever assembled, it is almost as if this were the event the three men had had in mind all along.

It would have pleased Guggenheim, who built his nonobjective collection around Kandinsky. It would have brought a wry smile to Wright, who knew that crowds would first flock into the Guggenheim Museum only to see what Wright had wrought but would eventually come to see a show perfectly suited to its chambered-nautilus setting. And surely it would have delighted Kandinsky, who once wrote: "I would like above all an exhibit as comprehensive as possible; quantity aids the discovery of inner meanings."

Fancies & Nightmares. In the early '30s, Art Collector Guggenheim, who had already shifted his allegiance from the old masters to modern art, was prodded by his great and good friend, the Baroness Hilla Rebay, into discovering Kandinsky. With the Baroness saying "That one and that one, and that one . . ." Guggenheim bought up more than 100 of Kandinsky's works, becoming the first great U.S. champion of the artist and his disciples.

The show is arranged chronologically from the top; the viewer passes down the ramp past the polychrome landscapes and medieval fancies of Kandinsky's early period (1902-08), then by the transitional things--romantic, mildly experimental, Fauvish exercises--of 1910 to 1911 when he began to break the tether of traditionalism and started to experiment in earnest with paintings like Romantic Landscape (see color). In 1912, while living in Germany, Kandinsky reached a point of no return. From there on, he was committed to expressing a world of darting lines, moiling colors and nightmare shapes. Abstract expressionism, which went on to produce many other and better painters, was born on his palette.

Sand & Paint. There is an unexpected mood of joy in most of Kandinsky's work, almost an air of frivolity in some of it. Color, which he seemed to have made an honest effort to subdue in some of his early abstractions, keeps churning to the surface, and in the end he surrendered to it completely. He never ceased to experiment: one painting in the show, Accompanied Contrast (1935), has sand mixed in with the paint on the canvas. Later he seemed to be looking into a world of microscopy; his (Surroundings) (Environment) of 1936 resembles a blown-up slide of gaudy amoebae sprawling on a speckled lab culture. And in one of his last works, A Conglomerate (1943), he slyly reintroduces some recognizable figures in the form of a pointing hand, a pair of seated people, some chimneys and a gable. But always Kandinsky was primarily concerned with form: "It must be finally understood that for me form is but the means towards an end, and that I am occupied with the theory of form and give up so much because I want to fathom what is innermost in the form and make it clear, very clear for other people."

The show at the Guggenheim was put together mainly from the museum's own impressive collection of Kandinskys, from the Gabriele Muenter Foundation of the Stadtische Galerie in Munich (which now owns the Kandinskys collected by his pupil and onetime beloved, Painter Gabriele Muenter), and the collection of Nina Kandinsky, the artist's widow, who lives in France. But Director Thomas Messer pulled off an even more impressive coup of roundupmanship: with the help of Mme. Kandinsky and Paris' Musee National d'Art Moderne, he engineered delicate negotiations with Moscow, bringing seven paintings in the show from Russia, on loan from Moscow's Municipal Museum of Modern Western Art, the Russian Museum in Leningrad, and the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow, all dating from the pre-1914 period of Kandinsky's transition from nice painter to artistic revolutionary. When the giant retrospective closes in Manhattan this spring, it will travel to Paris, The Hague and Basel, and another show organized by the Guggenheim (minus the Russian loans) will open in Pasadena and later visit ten cities in the U.S.

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