Kandinsky returns to Amsterdam

Amsterdam. In 1904, between May 23 and June 21, Wassily Kandinsky and his partner, Gabriele Münter, made a quick trip to the Netherlands. During this stay, the painter executed a few paintings. More than a century later, these Dutch landscapes, a brief interlude in his work, are proudly presented in the exhibition that the Amsterdam museum H’Art is dedicating to the Russian artist. H’Art Museum is the new name of the former branch of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, which, for obvious political reasons, was renamed in June 2023. This change had important consequences. The agreements with the Russian museum were cancelled, replaced by others concluded with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Tate Modern in London and especially with the Centre Pompidou, which is at the origin of this retrospective.

The chronological journey begins with Kandinsky’s early years in Munich (Germany), where he arrived in 1896. The painter quickly adopted a neo-impressionist style and produced many small-scale landscapes. It is also notable that even in his seemingly urban subjects, such as The Old Town II (1902), he focuses on what appears to be a garden in the middle of the city. Is this an impressionist legacy? Undoubtedly, but it is more likely that the landscape, more than the architecture and its geometric forms, allowed the painter greater plastic flexibility and chromatic freedom.

Painting under glass

The exhibition reserves a section for the artist’s travels, to Italy, France, and later to Tunisia. In reality, travel, at least in Europe, does not have much impact on his work. It is different for his dives into time and especially into his childhood, which give rise to souvenir images such as those recounted in his book with the evocative title, Looking back (1913). Thus, Sunday, Old Russia (1904), this practically medieval representation of his native country, is one of these visions of a fairy-tale past.

His stay, like that of Paul Klee in Tunisia, resulted in the introduction of an extraordinary luminosity that influenced his chromatic range. Angela Lampe, curator at the Musée national d’art moderne-Centre Pompidou and curator with Birgit Boelens, curator at H’Art, rightly makes the connection between Arab city (1905) and one of Kandinsky’s most famous paintings, Improvisation III (1909). From 1908 onwards, the artist often stayed in Murnau, a village south of Munich that was a centre of reverse glass painting. This folk art, with its simplified forms, inspired Kandinsky in his work with Münter but also with Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, his partner, herself a painter. From then on, the artist moved away from the representation still dependent on reality and experimented with increasingly abstract compositions – Improvisation XIV (1910), Impression V (1911) and this masterpiece, With the black bow (1912).

The war forced Kandinsky to return to Russia, where, although with little ardor, he participated in the revolutionary movements. However, he did not remain impervious to a new form of abstraction in the Suprematist version of Malevich or the Constructivist version of El Lissitzky. However, when the Bauhaus offered him a teaching position, he did not hesitate. In Amsterdam, an important place was given to the years spent in this famous German art school, during which the painter succeeded in injecting a dose of lyricism into geometric compositions – see the magnificent canvas offered to his wife Nina for Christmas in 1926. The school was closed with the rise to power of the Nazis; Kandinsky and Nina took refuge in France in 1933. In the last years of his life – the artist died in 1944 – Kandinsky’s production, in contact with surrealism and biomorphic abstraction, lost some of its power and took on slightly decorative accents. But let’s return to two highlights of the exhibition. The first is the reconstruction of the imposing Reception Room (painted surface: 145 m2 in total) executed by Kandinsky and his students at the Bauhaus (1922) for the Juryfreie Kunstschau in Berlin, a piece from the National Museum of Modern Art. The second is an attractive video, both educational and poetic, created by the artist Bink van Vollenhoven.