Word: guggenheims
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Such a life, woven through so many cultural milieus, is not easily condensed into one retrospective show. The Guggenheim Museum in New York has set out to describe it in three parts, the first of which, "Kandinsky in Munich: 1896-1914," is now on view. It is focused, not exclusively on the text of Kandinsky's own paintings, but on their context as well. What did he see in Munich? What did he get from other artists' work? The exhibition, closely and intelligently curated by Art Historian Peg Weiss, is therefore largely about the Jugendstil, or youth-style...
Later exhibitions will deal with Kandinsky at the Bauhaus and in Paris. By 1985, presumably, the Guggenheim Museum will have fulfilled its destiny as the St. Peter's of Kandinsky studies. That is fitting enough, since the museum is (so to speak) built over the ruins of a shrine that housed his cult in the 1940s. This was the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, set up and run by Solomon Guggenheim's mistress, the Baroness Hilla Rebay, who-in her dottily hierophantic devotion to the Great Artist, not to mention her purported Nazi sympathies-was for a time...
...idea that such a transcendent being might have had a context would have been anathema to the baroness, but her collection became the core of the Guggenheim Museum. Meanwhile, the blazing torch of devotion has turned into a curatorial flashlight, poking abruptly here and there amid the somewhat musty recesses of the Jugendstil. Such are the sorrows of no longer believing that art and religion are the same thing...
Other members of the search committee, which was formed about a year ago, include Glen Bowersock, former Harvard dean and associate of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, Richard Caves, professor of Economics, Angelica Rubenstein, and official of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and John W. Strauss, a Fogg Visiting committee member...
...natural draftsman, and his best paintings of the early '40s, like the She-Wolf or Male and Female, are set down with terrible earnest ness but with no graphic facility. When he set up a repeated frieze of drawn motifs, as in the mural he did for Peggy Guggenheim in 1943, the result-as drawing-was rather monotonous. But when he found he could throw lines of paint in the air, the laws of energy and fluid motion made up for the awkwardness of his fist and, from then on, there was no grace that he could not claim...