WHEN: On view through January 4, 2015 in the Ingram Gallery.
Kandinsky: A Retrospective
BRIEF ABOUT: Organized chronologically and spanning the artist’s periods in Russia, Germany and France, the exhibition begins with paintings from the early 1900s including landscapes, painted folk tales and figurative works by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). This show records four decades of artistic evolution, from early figurative works to exuberant experiments in abstraction and color, offering viewers an extraordinary stylistic journey of one of the most innovative modern art masters of the twentieth century.
The exhibit is drawn largely from the collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris and features more than 100 paintings, drawings and other works. Additional paintings from the Milwaukee Art Museum, including works by Gabriele Münter and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, further an appreciation of the artist in the context of his contemporaries.
Frist Center Chief Curator Mark Scala says, “Kandinsky felt that music has the capacity to induce spiritual feelings within listeners through its formal arrangement of melodic sounds, harmonies and rhythms. He believed that “painters could similarly ‘orchestrate’ the elements of art—color, form, and line—to trigger pure emotional experiences.” In the theoretical treatise “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, Kandinsky wrote that “color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer, while the soul is a piano of many strings. The artist is the hand through which the medium of different keys causes the human soul to vibrate.”
