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Serge Poliakoff, GSP, 1951.jpg

Lyrical Expression

From Schneider to Poliakoff
1922 - 1933

Comparative Gallery
10 rue des Beaux-Arts, 75006 Paris
 
May 17, 2022 - June 12, 2022

 

Gérard Schneider, Composition, Gouache sur papier, 1955.jpg
Serge Charchoune, La course éffrénée de Phebus, huile sur carton, 1943.jpg
Wassily_Kandinsky_Circles_in_a_Circle.jpg

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)
Circles in a Circle,1923

Oil on canvas

98.7 × 95.6 cm

image (1).jpg

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)
Blue Painting,1924

Oil on canvas

50.7 x 49.5 cm

image.jpg

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)
Several Circles,1926

Oil on canvas

140.7 x 140.3 cm

Serge Poliakoff, GSP, 1951, in situ web.jpg
Serge Poliakoff, GSP, 1969 in situ.jpg

Comparative Gallery is pleased to present Wassily Kandinsky : Bauhaus Years Paintings 1922 - 1933. The show opens on May 17 and runs through June 12 at the gallery’s uptown location, 10 rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

 

When Kandinsky returned to his native Moscow after the outbreak of World War I, his expressive abstract style underwent changes that reflected the utopian artistic experiments of the Russian avant-garde. The emphasis on geometric forms, promoted by artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Liubov Popova in an effort to establish a universal aesthetic language, inspired Kandinsky to expand his own pictorial vocabulary. Although he adopted some aspects of the geometrizing trends of Suprematism and Constructivism—such as overlapping flat planes and clearly delineated shapes—his belief in the expressive content of abstract forms alienated him from the majority of his Russian colleagues, who championed more rational, systematizing principles. This conflict led him to return to Germany in 1921. In the Black Square, executed two years later, epitomizes Kandinsky’s synthesis of Russian avant-garde art and his own lyrical abstraction: the white trapezoid recalls Malevich’s Suprematist paintings, but the dynamic compositional elements, resembling clouds, mountains, sun, and a rainbow, still refer to the landscape.

In 1922 Kandinsky joined the faculty of the Weimar Bauhaus, where he discovered a more sympathetic environment in which to pursue his art. Originally premised on a Germanic, expressionistic approach to artmaking, the Bauhaus aesthetic came to reflect Constructivist concerns and styles, which by the mid-1920s had become international in scope. While there, Kandinsky furthered his investigations into the correspondence between colors and forms and their psychological and spiritual effects. In Composition 8, the colorful, interactive geometric forms create a pulsating surface that is alternately dynamic and calm, aggressive and quiet. The importance of circles in this painting prefigures the dominant role they would play in many subsequent works, culminating in his cosmic and harmonious image Several Circles. “The circle,” claimed Kandinsky, “is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.”

Nancy Spector

Press Release

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