We have been SUPER busy over here at 1000Museums. Several new projects are taking off and while it is very exciting, it is also time consuming! With that, we continue today with our regular Semi-Weekly art feature at a very special place– the Guggenheim.
Photograph by: David Heald.
Title: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York IV
Source: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Available on our website!
While the Guggenheim has an ongoing exhibit of Vasily Kandinsky’s work, the “Kandinsky’s Painting with White Border” exhibit that opened this weekend provides an intimate look at the creative process used by Kandinsky. The works are Kandinsky’s attempts to recreate images from a trip he took to Moscow in 1912. The Guggenheim’s Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, Tracey Bashkoff, explains the exhibit in acute detail:
Vasily Kandinsky’s canvas, Painting with White Border (Bild mit weissem Rand, May 1913) was inspired by a trip the artist took to Moscow in fall 1912. Upon his return to Munich, where he had been living intermittently since 1896, Kandinsky searched for a way to visually record the “extremely powerful impressions” of his native Russia that lingered in his memory. Over a period of five months, he explored various motifs and compositions in study after study, moving freely between pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, and oil. After he produced at least 16 studies, Kandinsky finally arrived at the pictorial solution to the painting: the white border. In his seminal 1911 treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Insbesondere in der Malerei (On the Spiritual in Art: And Painting in Particular), Kandinsky wrote that the color white expresses a “harmony of silence . . . pregnant with possibilities.”
This focused exhibition, co-organized with the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., brings the Guggenheim’s final version of the painting from May 1913 together with twelve related drawings and watercolors and one major oil sketch, and features the results of an extensive conservation study of the Guggenheim and Phillips paintings. The study unearthed a previously unknown landscape painting beneath the surface of the Phillips’s Sketch I for Painting with White Border (Moscow) (Skizze für Bild mit weissem Rand [Moskau], 1913). A rare glimpse into Kandinsky’s creative process, Kandinsky’s Painting with White Border reveals the gradual and deliberate way the artist sought to translate his ideas into a bold new language of abstraction.
Kandinsky’s work is a cornerstone of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s collection. The museum’s founder, industrialist Solomon R. Guggenheim, began acquiring Kandinsky’s paintings—including Painting with White Border—as early as 1929, and today the Guggenheim’s holdings of his work are among the most extensive in the world.
-From the Guggenheim Exhibition Website
Below are some the pieces in the exhibition. All of these are available in archival prints at our website!
Painting with White Border Moscow, May 1913
Item No: 202634
Item Type: Archival Print
Source: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle), 1913
Item No: 202633
Item Type: Archival Print
Source: National Gallery of Art, Washington
Item No: 202636
Item Type: Archival Print
Source: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Watercolor after ‘Painting with White Border (Moscow)’, 1915
Item No: 202635
Item Type: Archival Print
Source: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Sketch I For ‘Painting with White Border (Moscow)’, 1913
Item No: 202630
Item Type: Archival Print
Source: The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
Study for ‘Painting with White Border (Moscow)’, 1913
Item No: 202631
Item Type: Archival Print
Source: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München
Study for ‘Painting with White Border (Moscow)’, 1913
Item No: 202632
Item Type: Archival Print
Source: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München
2 comments
KatiesCameraBlog says:
Oct 25, 2011
Wishing i lived some where closer so I could attend!
1000museums says:
Oct 25, 2011
Me too!