Wassily Kandinsky

There is a major show of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings at the Guggenheim in New York -- no surprise there, he has always been one of their favorite artists. He belongs to the generation that created "modern" painting, a process that always looks to me like an act of demolition. Starting with paintings that were much like the representational art of the nineteenth century, or the colorful crayon landscapes of the Impressionists, Kandinsky, Picasso and their peers gradually broke their images apart into collages and rendered the elements in simpler and more distorted ways, until they ended up with abstraction. Like, I think, a lot of people who don't get abstract painting, I have always found the early stages of this process fascinating, but wish they had not carried on. I also wonder why they did. Was ever increasing abstraction just a fashion that captured their imaginations? Was it some internal dynamic of their work, which, once started on, almost forced to continue down that path? Was some outside political or intellectual force driving them away from depicting recognizable objects and people? Were they running away from photography?

Anyway, Kandinsky's career provides a great view of this process, and I wish I could get to New York for the show. The NY Times has a slideshow of some works, but for reasons I will not ponder there is a much better collection at a site called "chess theory." Below, four images that show the general arc of Kandinsky's career, dated 1902, 1907, 1909, and 1912.