Inventing Abstraction at MoMA
Now at MoMA, your chance to see the original version of the poster that crops up in living rooms and dorm rooms the world over. We're talking about Kandinsky's Color Study 1913, on view as part of the museum's Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925. This exhibition seeks to show how artists borrowed from, corresponded with, and commented upon the work of other artists in other media in order to, well, invent abstraction ("All these people would have been Facebook friends," said a mom to her kids as they prepared to enter.)
It starts with Picasso and ends right around Beuys and the Arps, who saw the traditional canvas as characteristic of a "pretentious, conceited world." It includes a recording of and program from a performance by Schoenberg that helped lead Kandinsky to radically rethink the possibilities of painting, as well as the resulting post-performance sketches. It displays Mademoiselle Kupka Among the Verticals (above), a powerful work from 1910-11 in which FrantiĊĦek Kupka pretty much lays the groundwork for the eradication of the figure by obscuring a portrait of his wife. It's a reminder that abstraction isn't just about looking at color and contemplating how it makes you feel, but is an exercise in cogitation, in considering what makes a shape, in reducing art to its fundamentals like brushstroke and lines, in contemplating the multifaceted ways of representing the world.
Photo: thanks
It starts with Picasso and ends right around Beuys and the Arps, who saw the traditional canvas as characteristic of a "pretentious, conceited world." It includes a recording of and program from a performance by Schoenberg that helped lead Kandinsky to radically rethink the possibilities of painting, as well as the resulting post-performance sketches. It displays Mademoiselle Kupka Among the Verticals (above), a powerful work from 1910-11 in which FrantiĊĦek Kupka pretty much lays the groundwork for the eradication of the figure by obscuring a portrait of his wife. It's a reminder that abstraction isn't just about looking at color and contemplating how it makes you feel, but is an exercise in cogitation, in considering what makes a shape, in reducing art to its fundamentals like brushstroke and lines, in contemplating the multifaceted ways of representing the world.
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