“Must we not renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?” In his 1911 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Vasily Kandinsky championed expression and spirituality over naturalistic depiction. Earlier that year, he had publicly exhibited an abstract painting for the first time.
Kandinsky made the works on view here in the years immediately before and after this watershed moment. Early examples feature recognizable motifs—for instance, a hunter with a bow in a vibrant patchwork landscape—but by 1914, he largely released form and color from representation. Instead, he produced dynamic arrangements of shapes and lines that evoke a sense of motion. He also looked to music as a model for visual composition. Using its language of melodies and harmonies, he imagined new pictorial categories, such as “impressions” and “improvisations,” to elicit emotional and sensorial responses from viewers. “Color is a keyboard,” he declared. “The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings.”
Organized by Jodi Hauptman, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, and Lydia Mullin, Manager, Collection Galleries, with Rachel Remick, Curatorial Associate, Department of Curatorial Affairs and Department of Painting and Sculpture.
