Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Continuing Kandinsky at the Guggenheim. Here’s part one and part two…

As mentioned here, in 1907 Vasily Kandinsky moved to Paris. By the next year his paintings had changed: His compositions became more sophisticated, his brushwork more au courant, his colors more immediate and alive. What Kandinsky saw in Paris changed him. And the artist whose work I think he must have seen the most was Henri Matisse. It wasn’t just Matisse’s work that I think appealed to Kandinsky, I think Matisse’s biography, too.

Like Kandinsky, Matisse was fast-approaching middle-age. Like Kandinsky, Matisse had spent years making dark, Northern European paintings, struggling to break through into a progressive, new style. Matisse got there in 1906, when he was 36 years old. When Kandinsky arrived in Paris, he had just turned 40.

As Vivian Endicott Barnett notes in her catalogue essay, sometime during 1907 Kandinsky likely had his first exposure to one of two paintings (and probably both): An oil sketch for Le Bonheur de Vivre owned by Sarah and Michael Stein [at left, now in the collection of SFMOMA] and the finished painting itself. Given that the Steins lived in the same apartment building as Kandinsky’s girlfriend Gabriele Munter, it’s certainly possible that Kandinsky had regular opportunities to study the sketch. (Leo Stein owned the ‘final’ painting. It’s possible — even likely — that Kandinsky had access to it too. In fact, the Steins and their circle had plenty of connections to Kandinsky: Alice Toklas’ cousin Annette Rosenshine visited Kandinsky’s studio with Gabriele Munter at least once in early 1907, before Kandinsky’s big breakthrough. And Kandinsky had his own connections to Matisse: In 1908 and 1909, when Kandinsky seems to have been studying Matisse most intently, Matisse’s favorite model was Olga Meerson, a German who was a dear friend of Munter’s. Kandinsky was also friends with Meerson and painted her portrait in Munich in 1902.)

Last week I noted that Kandinsky soaked up influences and incorporated them into his work more aggressively than any of his contemporaries save Pablo Picasso. Sometime in 1908 Matisse’s palette and radical compositions begin to work their way into Kandinsky’s art: For example, Blue Mountain of 1908-09 recalls Matisse’s fauve experiments and Kandinsky’s paintings of 1908 and 1909 are full of colors that Kandinsky had never previously considered — Matisse’s colors. But it was Bonheur that must have dominated Kandinsky’s attention. It’s first evident in Kandinsky’s 1909 painting Mountain, wherein the composition recalls the structure of Bonheur, and the palette seems directly lifted from it. Walking up the Guggenheim’s ramp you can almost feel a major showdown coming, a painting in which Kandinsky attempts to synthesize everything he learned from Bonheur.

Sure enough: That painting is 1909-10’s Sketch for Composition II [below], which is arguably Kandinsky’s masterpiece and which is certainly Kandinsky’s declaration of arrival into the European avant-garde. (A larger image, along with many detail images, is available on the Guggenheim’s collection site, here.)

Kandinsky’s painting is so careful, so detailed, so referential that it seems safe to assume he spent serious time with Bonheur at Leo’s and with the oil sketch at Michael and Sarah’s. The bright, startling yellows, oranges, reds, greens and purples of Matisse’s mid-fauve palette are all present in Kandinsky’s paintings of this period, never more clearly than in Sketch for Composition II. Those colors would remain important to him for the next 15 years. (And could Kandinsky’s title be a reference to the debt he owed to Leo’s mini-Bonheur?)

Like Bonheur, the Kandinsky recedes from the foreground into the center-top of the painting. There is a couple embracing in the foreground-right of the Matisse, and there seems to be a reference to that couple in nearly the same place in the Kandinsky. (Kandinsky also mimics the Matisse by placing embracing figures — or about-to-embrace figures — in the center-left of the painting.)

Just above Matisse’s embracing couple there is a little glade of green-trunked treees. Those trees are in roughly the same spot in Composition. Kandinsky even gives the trees branches or blooms of red and green — the same reds and greens that Matisse uses in Bonheur. Matisse places reclining nudes at the center of Bonheur; Kandinsky, who had probably seen enough Matisse at this point (Leo owned Matisse’s 1907 Blue Nude) to realize that Matisse was intensely modernizing the reclining nude and was making it something of a trademark, places his signature image of a horse-and-rider at the center of his painting. I think that Kandinsky aimed for a bravura synthesization of the French master — and he got it.

• Gabriel Orozco is everywhere this weekend: Hemispheres’ Aaron Gell on the crazy tourist; Deborah Sontag in the NYT.
• Big weekend for Anne Truitt reviews: Ken Johnson in the NYT and Lance Esplund in the WSJ.
• In the LAT, Suzanne Muchnic reports that the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is big into southeast Asian art, including works recently given to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. (Who knew, right? Well, initially, not the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco…)
• Phyllis Tuchman in Obit magazine on Thomas Hoving.
  
• DonorsChoose.org update: MAN readers have donated $678 $703 $728 so far this season to help 395 students have art education in their classrooms. Here’s how DonorsChoose.org works. Here’s where you can help!

The American Association of Museums’ code of ethics says that member museums must ensure that “programs are founded on scholarship and marked by intellectual integrity.” Yesterday, in a Q&A here on MAN, New Orleans Museum of Art director E. John Bullard admitted that NOMA’s installation of a Disney marketing display-cum-exhibition in NOMA’s galleries was not founded on scholarship and that intellectual integrity was not a consideration.

Bullard said that NOMA’s new exhibition, ‘Dreams Come True,’ originated with the Walt Disney Co. He said that his museum and its curators stood by as Disney employees pitched the presentation and then as Disney “did all the curatorial selection, crated it all up [and] packed it.” Bullard said his museum “wasn’t interested in a general animation exhibition,” that is, the museum’s only interest was in presenting a single corporation’s marketing display at the same time that corporation was launching a major film based in his city (and, not coincidentally, during the holiday DVD-selling, movie-merchandising season). There is no indication that the museum asserted its independence or its institutional integrity. NOMA did not insist on independent scholarship (the show’s catalogue was wholly produced by Disney), and it did not question whether or not the exhibition/marketing-installation was an appropriate use of a non-profit art institution’s galleries.

The Disney show at NOMA would be a perfectly reasonable enterprise were it housed in a convention center or some other type of commercially-oriented rental hall. Its presence at the New Orleans Museum of Art is an obvious violation of the code of ethics to which the museum is bound. This isn’t complicated: Museums should not turn their art galleries over to corporations that want to market their products. Both the museum’s leadership and its trustees abdicated their responsibilities.

In our interview, Bullard made no real attempt to defend the museum ethics. Instead he said that critics shouldn’t snipe that NOMA is showing “popular art.” That’s a strawman. I raised no such distinction in my questioning of Bullard and I’ve read no one complain about the fine arts vs. “popular arts” distinction. (Maybe because this question was settled years ago. See Fischinger, Oskar or Kentridge, William.)

Bullard also said that the show came about as “a result of” Hurricane Katrina. It’s true that NOMA had nearly 100 employees, a number which fell to 15 in the wake of the storm and the federal government’s incompetent response. NOMA is back up to 55 employees. Its curatorial department is two-thirds the size it was pre-Katrina. It is a solid, mid-major American art museum with annual expenses of $7 million and an impressive collection. (Art museums have a major advantage over every other kind of non-profit at the time of recession or disaster: They have a collection that they can exhibit and around which they can program. Food banks don’t.) As Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight noted, Bullard’s Katrina reference is an unfortunate attempt to mask or excuse an error by referencing a national tragedy.

Bullard closed our chat by saying that NOMA’s behavior isn’t as bad as the Guggenheim’s. He’s right — but only because NOMA didn’t pocket $15 million from someone at Disney as it was launching Disney’s display.

The Disney hand-over comes with immediate consequences for the museum: Candidates who interview for the NOMA directorship — a search for the museum’s next leader is underway — should be wary that NOMA’s trustees will foist a similar show upon them. They should know that the board will need to be educated about an art museum’s responsibilities to itself, to its community and to art.

Catesby Leigh has a must-read piece in the WSJ about the $85 million cladding problem at the National Gallery of Art.

Related: From MAN, the NGA’s East Building reconsidered, part one, part two.

One of the more striking aspects of the Guggenheim’s Kandinsky retrospective is the way the exhibition’s curators open the show with two leaden, midlife Kandinskys from 1907… and then how quickly Kandinsky goes from regionalism into the prime of his career. Among the quickest transitions Kandinsky made was from a heavy palette — dark greens, purples, dark blues, browns — to pink, yellow, peach and the pale blue of the Mediterranean. So as I asked yesterday: What happened? How did Vasily Kandinsky go from copycat impressionism in 1904, to this tepid portrait in 1905 [at right: Portrait of Gabrielle Munter] and then back to impressionism in 1906 (none of which are in the Guggenheim show), only to emerge as art’s pioneering abstract colorist?

Kandinsky’s work suggests that in late 1906 and in 1907 Kandinsky discovered Henri Matisse, and that Kandinsky fell for him in a big way. Walking the first years of ‘Kandinsky’ along the famed Guggenheim ramp is like joining Kandinsky in his discovery of Matisse and the new ways of painting that Matisse’s work made possible.

I think the story began in 1905 when Henri Matisse worked in Collioure, the seaside town at which the Pyrenees meet the Mediterranean. This was the first great year of fauvism, when Matisse, Derain, Manguin and others merged pointilism and divisionism with free brushstrokes and loud color to create something shockingly new.

After many years of wrestling with the burgeoning avant-gardist inside him, Matisse returned to Paris in 1905-06 after his first Fauve summer finally comfortable with the new thing he’d found. Matisse did not leave fauve color and spirit in the south of France, instead he brought it to his new Parisian studio, a big space in a former convent. When Matisse was in Collioure he mostly painted scenes around the town, its bay and views from the hills down toward the sea. Now, freed from ready access to boats or Collioure’s quaint landmarks and rich with studio space, he brought fauvism into the city and took it in new directions.

It  helped that events gave Matisse greater confidence in his new, avant-garde style. For the first time he was included in international exhibitions of cutting-edge French artists. The first was a show in Brussels, the second was an exhibition that traveled throughout Germany. It is not clear what four paintings Matisse sent to Germany, but it’s likely that they were early fauve paintings from 1905 and possibly early 1906, canvases that were still in touch with fauvism’s pointilist precedent. Kandinsky saw Matisse’s work in that German show, almost certainly for the first time. Matisse biographer Hilary Spurling recounts that Kandinsky described the show “as a bomb going off in the heart of Munich.” Perhaps inspired by the exhibition, by May of 1906 Kandinsky had moved to Paris, where he would stay for about a year. Within mere months of his arrival in the French capital, Kandinsky went from painting fussy portraits derived from Dutch old masters to experimenting with pointilism- and fauvism-inspired compositions. (Kandinsky had traveled through the Netherlands in 1904, and as I noted yesterday he was a quick assimilator.)

As Kandinsky was arriving in Paris, Matisse was just finishing the first great painting of the 20th-century: Le Bonheur de Vivre. [Image above: A sketch for Le Bonheur de Vivre in the collection of SFMOMA.] Informed by the colors, techniques and compositions Matisse had experimented with in Collioure, Le Bonheur de Vivre was fiction to the fauve summers’ non-fiction. When Matisse finished his breakthrough painting, he was 36 years old. He was still hoping that his second career (he had studied the law and had worked as a court administrator) would stick. This new painting would be shown to Paris — and to the 39-year old Kandinsky — that fall.

More next time…

Yesterday I posted the first project in MAN’s 2009 DonorsChoose.org challenge. By this morning the $378 project was fully funded!

I’ve added several new projects to our project page, including this one from a high-poverty area in Oklahoma:

We are a tuition-free college-prep charter school: 6th through 12th grade.

In-class silent reading is a requirement of our school-wide reading… program. My students [want] to have an art book library available to them during these planned reading sessions.

I have selected several books related to many art movements… I believe these selections provide a range of topics and reading levels [that will] engage students in a love of reading.

Please help here!

Through 1907, when Vasily Kandinsky was entering his forties, he was a regional artist of little consequence. He had yet to make a painting that was all his. Then something happened.

‘Kandinsky,’ a major retrospective on view at the Guggenheim thrillingly shows Kandinsky’s emergence into the avant-garde and his subsequent exploration of abstraction. So how did that breakthrough happen?

The exhibition effectively begins with two humdrum paintings that Kandinsky made in 1907, just after he turned 40. [At left: Colorful Life (Motley Life), 1907. The other painting is 1907's Riding Couple.] Both are hand-me-down pointilist canvases that utilize a technique borrowed from a decade-old avant-garde employed in the service of folksiness. The paintings indicate a willingness to wield color as a weapon, but nothing else about them — not their composition, their subject matter, nothing — hints at the breakthrough Kandinsky would make in 1909 and 1910.

Kandinsky’s achievement from that point forward is the focus of the Guggenheim exhibition. Organized by the Guggenheim’s Tracey Bashkoff along with curators in Munich and Paris, the exhibition wastes little time on Kandinsky’s early mediocre meanderings. Instead the curators show how Kandinsky began one of the most dramatic, unexpected breakthroughs in art history, how he grew from a provincial appropriator into the leading abstractionist. The show is not just a great Kandinsky exhibition, it is a lesson to curators who wallow in an artist’s mediocre beginnings or periods, thus diluting the power and impact of his real achievement. This is a muscular exhibition.

If there’s a gap in the Guggenheim’s narrative, it’s that the curators present little visual evidence that could help explain what motivated or enabled Kandinsky’s rise. A small selection of early 20th-century European paintings would have revealed that the secret to Kandinsky’s ascension was how well he processed art he saw and how he assimilated it into his work. With the exception of Pablo Picasso, none of Kandinsky’s peers absorbed influences and made them his own as aggressively as Kandinsky did.

Still, for visitors fluent in the language of art history, there are revelations here. One of them is that Kandinsky was receptive to an extraordinary range of painters, particularly the Parisians whom he first encountered in a German exhibition in 1906, and then whom he saw more fully after moving to Paris in 1907. (Magical years! Vivian Endicott Barnett discusses Kandinsky’s early-20thC travels in the catalogue’s best essay.) Signs of those influences pour forth from Kandinsky’s early mature canvases: Landscapes in particular recall the Pont Aven painters Emile Bernard, Paul Gauguin & Co., as well as an artist who would have been familiar to Kandinsky from exhibitions in Germany, Gustav Klimt. [Above, right: Murnau-Landscape with Tower, 1908.] Monet’s waterlilies and haystacks lurk just behind Kandinsky’s full-field compositions. Like the impressionists, Kandinsky isn’t shy about including industry in his landscapes. And along with so many artists of the period, Kandinsky was moved by Cezanne’s paint-handling.

While there are plenty of Kandinsky’s contemporaries in evidence, no one was as important to his breakthrough as was Henri Matisse, and to a lesser extent Matisse’s fellow fauves. We’ll pick up there next time.

Oodles of research reveals just how important arts education is when it comes to developing young minds. According to Americans for the Arts, young people who participate in the arts are many times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement, to be elected to class office within their schools, and are more likely to participate in a math and science fair. My mother was an art educator, so I’m particularly disappointed in how a lack of prioritization, the so-called No Child Left Behind law and other factors have driven the arts out of public schools.

Last December I spotlighted 16 school arts projects here on MAN, and MAN readers donated $2,962 via DonorsChoose.org to help over 1,200 students have art-related instruction as part of their education. The DonorsChoose.org concept is simple: When school teachers have programs they want to implement that go beyond what their (typically disadvantaged) schools will support, they post ‘proposals’ to the DonorsChoose.org website and ask microphilanthropists for a few hundred dollars in direct project support.

Between now and the end of the year I’ll be posting on arts-related projects from DonorsChoose. Most of them will require less than $500 to fully fund. DonorsChoose accepts microphilanthropic gifts of $10 and up. I urge MAN readers support worthy projects either as individuals or as a group. I’ll list donors early in January. If you put a little at-your-office group together — say the ‘Walker Art Center curatorial department’ — email me so that I know to list you as such. I’ve started a web page where you can see a list of proposals, where you can donate and where you can track our progress.

This year’s first project, which comes from a teacher working in a high poverty school district in Mississippi, is pretty darn cool:

My students will soon be studying perspective drawing. We will be looking at examples of perspective using a projector mounted on the ceiling. We will need rulers, paper, and colored pencils to learn how to draw in one and two point linear perspective.

Help ‘em out here!

• In the NYT, Karen Rosenberg chronicles the convoluted, market-impacted history of a mysterious, maybe-Velazquez, maybe-self-portrait on view at the Met.
• The Louisville Courier-Journal’s Diane Heileman reports that the Speed Museum has just snagged another $10 million and has building on the brain.
• Geoff Edgers of the Boston Globe examines the odd story of the mess surrounding the RISD Museum.
• Two book reviews worth reading: The Los Angeles Times’ Tim Rutten on Mark Lamster’s Master of Shadows, about painter-diplomat Peter Paul Rubens; and in the NYT Jennifer Baszile raves about Deborah Willis’ Posing Beauty, a “definitive history of black beauty.” (Two pretty striking covers too!)
• In the NYT, Damien Cave spotlights man-of-the-moment, the art world’s Jon Stewart, William Powhida. (Also here.)
• The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Nicole Wallace writes that MoMA’s Alzheimer’s Project is catching on at dozens of other museums.