The Russian avant-gardist Wassily Kandinsky - who dressed like the college professor he had trained to be and sounded like a mystic when he wasn't thinking like a scientist - is the central god in the Guggenheim pantheon of genius myth. The museum owns more of his work than of any other major Modernist and mounts some form of full-dress Kandinsky show like clockwork every 20 years or so.
It's that time again. The Guggenheims last excursion into Kandinsky occurred in the early 1980s with three context heavy exhibitions that examined his activities in all mediums. This one takes the opposite tack. It distills Kandinsky's momentous career to about 100 paintings, with a large side order of works on paper displayed in a adjacent gallery. The canvases and almost nothing else fill Frank Lloyds Wright great rotunda from bottom to top, sometimes at the magisterial rate of one painting per bay.
The show offers an unencumbered view of Kandinsky's painting career and style that he adjusted with every change of setting. Tending toward constructivism in Moscow, toward Klee at the Bauhaus and toward a surrealist-tinged biomorphism - for which he had laid the ground work 20 years earlier - in Paris. Not surprisingly, he bristled at the suggestion that he had been influenced by Arp and Miro.
