Around the Kandinsky circle

The Guggenheim Museum in New York has decided to organize an exhibition, dedicated to Wassily Kandinsky, to celebrate the painter in 80 works, who is considered one of the fathers of abstractionism.

The exhibition will last almost a year, because it was inaugurated on 8 October last and will close, except for extensions, on 5 September 2022.

Abstract art was born around 1910 thanks to Kandinskij, Kazimir Malevic and Piet Mondrian.

All three painters were also theorists, writing essays and books to explain and justify their artistic revolution.

Until 1800 art was concerned with reproducing reality. Perspective, chiaroscuro, colors and lines, all used and coordinated to give the illusion that what you see is real.

A window, today we would say a photograph, on objective figures that the painter is capable of rendering on a flat surface, be it canvas, table or wall for a fresco.

Abstract artists think, instead, that the artist's task is not to parrot reality or reproduce figures, deluding the viewer that those are real data.

The purpose of painting is to express sensations and feelings (expressive abstract art), with the spontaneous use of artistic possibilities, or to determine a new aesthetic vision, following the mind and intellect with geometric figures and structured combinations of shapes and colors.

The abstractionists defined their art as "concrete art", in controversy with figurative art, which "deludes" the viewer that the painting is a part of reality.

In fact, abstract art abolishes any perspective and is strictly two-dimensional.

It does not want to reproduce any figure and any objective element.

Abstract art wants the painting be considered for what it is: an artist's creation, something that did not exist before and is now there in front of our eyes.

A new object created to express or tell a story never seen before, if not in the artist's imagination.

Andrea Giuseppe Fadini