“Kandinsky’s Universe” at the Museum Barberini

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In his innovative works of abstraction, Wassily Kandinsky sought a kind of spiritual transcendence and cerebral mysticism that connected art-making to the soul. “Kandinsky’s Universe: Geometric Abstraction in the 20th Century” at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam charts this transformative time in modern art, as artists abandoned depictions of material reality for enchanting, poetic displays of their inner vision. Influenced by his time as a teacher at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky turned to colorful geometric forms whose lyrical spontaneity expressed, as he termed it, an “inner necessity.” One highlight, “Above and Left,” from 1925, features a mass of rectangular forms and two triangles that point, as the title indicates, above and left — directions Kandinsky associated with freedom. An earlier work, “In the Black Circle,” from 1923, recalls a luminous landscape of another world. While all shapes featured in his practice, it was the circle that Kandinsky considered the ideal form, writing, “The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions…it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.” Both paintings were created in the period preceding his theoretical treatise “Point and Line to Plane” and are among the 125 artworks at the Museum Barberini by Kandinsky and more than 70 artists, including Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Agnes Martin and Frank Stella, that celebrate abstraction in its multitude of shapely forms.

^{Photo: Wassily Kandinsky, "Above and left," 1925. Courtesy Museum Barberini}