Threebies no.1

Those visiting friends were off to Sydney, pretty much for one day, and we went too.  That day was big.  First visit was to the Art Gallery of NSW for Kandinsky.  I remember my first encounter with Kandinksy, in Oxford.  Sweeps of colour and form and no obvious subject.  This was he same Kandinsky but a retrospective like this can help interpretation.  The works were mainly from NYC (Guggenheim).  Intriguingly we started with a video of him painting, how his forms developed quickly and intuitively.  Early works seemed somewhat impressionistic so we could see people and places but that developed through time and eras with various interpretations by strings of admirers.  When younger he studied law and had a possible professorship but was drawn to Munich and art.  He wrote a significant work of art theory and for a time worked as a senior art bureaucrat.  He was friend of many great artists of various formats, painters but also authors and more, an influencer, not least through his time teaching at the Bauhaus, variously resident through Europe, subject to all manner of difficulties and changes due to politics and wars, living in the time of World Wars and revolutions in Russia, Germany, France and dying in Paris shortly after its liberation. Handsome, too.  I can find such modernism and abstraction a bit hard to take, as people find various arts of this time, but I mellowed through the exhibition even if some commentary could raise a smile.  "I know of nothing more real than the paining of Kandinsky ... He organises matter as matter was organised, otherwise the universe would not exist.  He opened a window to look inside the All." (Diego Rivera). "Kandinsky's shift towards biomorphic imagery ... finds echoes in the exploration of invisible worlds and new knowledges being discovered by modern science.  Around 1934, other kinds of signs entered Kandinsky's pictorial vocabulary too: exclamation and quotation marks".  "... a lunar orb glows in the expanse beyond an open doorway, which is connected to a set of stairs with no physical support.  This could be a portal to the cosmos, or some indeterminate space beyond the picture plane, in a probable nod to alternative dimensions or the capacity for mystical ascendance."  My intellectual or spiritual appreciation may be more limited than demanded by the commentary having seen double bass mutes in one painting and an Egyptian cartouche in another, but I could feel the colour and movement and shapes and I could accept one or two on my wall so I learnt something.

The Kandinsky exhibition was curated with the Guggenheim Gallery NYC and is on display at the Art Gallery of NSW.