Kandinsky & O’Keeffe

How instructive, and what a pleasure, to view back-to-back, at the Whitney and the Guggenheim, respectively, shows of abstract art by Georgia O’Keeffe and Vasily Kandinsky! Kandinsky was arguably the first abstract painter, and O’Keeffe, over in backward America, was not far behind. Most interestingly, both came to abstract art through music. It sounds obvious in hindsight, the goal of creating on paper or canvas the emotions or sensations produced by a song or a symphony. Just as music doesn’t need words, or any exact representation, to be fulfilling art, so painting should not need recognizable images.

 

The early images by O’Keeffe in the Whitney exhibition seemed derived from the violin, particularly the long neck with curling end, while Kandinsky moved toward abstraction with a horse-and-rider (such as can be seen in the MIA’s Study for Improvisation V). O’Keeffe was more clearly painting for herself; the older, more established Kandinsky took account of public reaction and moved toward complete abstraction gradually, from 1910 to 1912, to accustom his audience to his work. 1911’s Picture with a Circle (Tbilisi) was the first painting in the show that I would classify as totally abstract. Both Kandinsky and O’Keeffe featured a lot of what I call gooey lines in their early abstractions, which means I wasn’t wild about those works.

 

1914’s Improvisation 35 (Basel) marks the appearance of some sharp lines in a Kandinsky abstraction, but he doesn’t produce the paintings I like until he goes to the Bauhaus in Germany in 1923. Composition 8 from the Guggenheim collection sums up what I like best about Kandinsky, and what attracted me to his art 40 years ago: geometric shapes of beautiful colors floating on a pristine background, seemingly at random but harmoniously balanced.

 

The beautiful shapes and colors – which, frankly, describes for me a small minority of the works in the show – are more than matched by O’Keeffe once she gets going. An unusual aspect of her abstraction, pointed out by the audioguide, is the way her forms cover the entire canvas. Her shapes are not broken into bits and pieces, fractals if you will; there is no echo of cubism. Instead of attacking the canvas, as a male contemporary would, she seems to love it, to embrace it. Her other consistent attribute, attributed by the audioguide to her exposure to Stieglitz and photo-cropping, was to blow up her image so it swelled well outside the picture frame. You can create an abstraction out of any natural object if you zoom in close enough. That may not be what O’Keeffe did – except, obviously, in the case of her flowers – but that is a way of seeing her pictures.

 

For me, almost every gallery in the Whitney show contained an object of exquisite beauty. They were saved from being “pretty” by the delicate shadings of her colors, and the colors themselves were often remarkable. The debate over whether her works reflect feminine sexuality is almost silly, because there is no other way to see them. But rather than diminish their power or artistic significance, this just makes her work more unique, startling even. And when you put her accomplishments in the context of her times, they are all the more breathtaking.

 

Whereas the Kandinsky show presented the full range of his oeuvre (albeit with an emphasis on his larger works), the O’Keeffe restricted our view to only one side of her art. The MIA show two years ago, of course, was smaller and even more limited – “Circling Around Abstraction” showed us only a portion of her abstract images, some of which were also present at the Whitney. No skulls or crosses or adobe houses or Manhattan skyscrapers or that big tree, or the realistic portrait of Beauford Delaney in Myron Kunin’s collection. To make a point and justify the loans, an exhibition of someone as overexposed as Georgia O’Keeffe has to adopt a particular theme, which necessarily warps your impression of the artist’s development. It also means you get too much of the same thing – and the same can be said of the Kandinsky show, which had the imperative of filling the Guggenheim ramp. But why quibble, when there was so much to see and learn and remember about two of the seminal abstract artists of their century.

 

Also on this trip I saw the exhibition of Vermeer’s Milkmaid (Rijksmuseum) at the Metropolitan and read a $10 Taschen monograph on Caravaggio, causing me to reflect on two of the indisputably greatest painters of all time. Besides seeing the Milkmaid itself, the most interesting part of the show was an introductory wall panel that presented all 36 known Vermeers in hopefully chronological order, allowing you to compare his works, one to another. This left the distinct impression that not all his works are great. In fact, one could fairly easily rank his paintings in six groupings, from mediocre to great, and not get much argument. Seeing 50 of Caravaggio’s works in one slim volume left the same impression. For what they are, there is nothing greater than Vermeer’s Milkmaid or Caravaggio’s Vocation of Saint Matthew. But how many museumgoers race to a painting and swoon over it, and how many collectors or museums would kill for a painting, just because it is “a Vermeer” or “a Caravaggio” when, without the attribution, it would hardly be noticed?

 

October 1, 2009

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