ART EXHIBITION
Runs through May 4th 2014
In another article on this blog, we talked about Andy Warhol’s exhibit in Milan. However, Palazzo Reale in Milan is presenting the first great Milanese exhibition of another great artist, Kandinsky. The show will trace the artistic and spiritual evolution of this great visionary and revolutionary artist, from the colorful and figurative works of his art school period up to his most avant-garde pieces.
Vasily Vasilievich Kandinsky was born in Moscow on December 4, 1866, and four years later he moved with his family to Odessa, Germany. Here, besides attending a classical gymnasium (grammar school), he took drawing lessons as well. “I remember that drawing and a little bit later painting lifted me out of the reality”, he wrote later.
At the age of 30, giving up a promising career teaching law and economics, he moved to Monaco, where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts. He was not immediately granted admission and began learning art on his own. At the beginning of World War I, he returned to Moscow, but because of his total disagreement with the official theories on art prevailing in the communist city, returned to Germany in 1921. Here, he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture of Weimar until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived until his death in 1944.
He’s renowned as the first artist to create compositions that are purely abstract. The works in this exhibition will take the visitor within the symphonic labyrinth of points, lines, surfaces, and colors, where each element has its own function, as in wanting to convey something on a symbolic and musical level as well. It is in fact known that the artist actually used musical terms to identify his works, and called his most spontaneous paintings “improvisations” while describing more elaborate works as “compositions.”
With the exhibition consisting of over one-hundred pieces on loan from Paris’s Pompidou Center, visitors will be able to witness the artist’s chronological transformation. If you like abstract painting Milan is waiting for you!
by Nicoletta Paganucci
