KANDINSKY - ABSOLUTE. ABSTRACT

25. Okt. 2008 - 22. Febr. 2009, verlängert bis 8. März 2009

The Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York are the three museums that hold the largest collections of works by Wassily Kandinsky in the world.Together these three museums are showing a major retrospective exhibition of works by this outstanding modernist artist. Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866 and died in 1944 in Paris, and is seen as one of the great innovators in twentieth-century art and a founder of abstract painting.The exhibition, with around 90 paintings, will begin in the Lenbachhaus in Munich. All of the major periods of Kandinsky’s work will be covered, as the three collections involved complement each other perfectly. The Lenbachhaus is able to draw on its outstanding collection of works from the Blue Rider period up to 1914, whereas the Centre Pompidou collection focuses on Kandinsky’s work during the Russian Revolution and his time at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau up to 1933. Kandinsky’s later oeuvre from his Paris years from 1933 to 1944 is finely represented with works from the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The show will include only major paintings that were decisive in Kandinsky’s artistic development. The exhibition of paintings in the Kunstbau will be complemented by a further show of Kandinsky’s entire graphic art in the Lenbachhaus. During the exhibition it will also still be possible to view the famous Blue Rider collection in the Lenbachhaus, which will then be closed to the public from spring 2009 to 2012 for extensive refurbishment of the museum. After the exhibition in the Lenbachhaus, the large Kandinsky show will go on to our partner museums in Paris (April – August 2009) and New York (September 2009 – January 2010).

Bildunterschriften:

Improvisation 19, 1911
Oil tempera on canvas, 120 x 141,5 cm
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Various Parts, 1940
Oil on canvas, 89 x 116 cm
Permanent loan Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung, Munich
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Several Circles, 1926
Oil on canvas, 140,3 x 140,7 cm
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Striped, 1934
Oil with sand on canvas, 110,6 x 120,2 cm
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn