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ART REVIEW : A Showcase for Abstraction

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Times Art Writer

Recent speculation about the destiny of Norton Simon’s art collection has obscured at least one important fact: The show goes on at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. In addition to long-term displays of major works in the collection, five or six temporary exhibitions each year offer periodic glimpses of a cache that is much too large to show all at once in the spacious building.

A current pair of exhibitions (on view through July) deals with the development of abstraction. A group of 28 works by Wassily Kandinsky is complemented by an adjacent presentation, “The Path to Abstraction,” that provides 36 paintings, drawings and prints by six modernists who were affiliated with or influenced by the Russian painter.

Most of the pieces are drawn from the Galka Scheyer collection, a treasure acquired by Simon when he took over the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art. Scheyer, who was born in Germany in 1889, came to the United States in 1924 and lived in Hollywood from around 1930 to her death in 1945. A long-time champion of Russian painter Alexei Jawlensky, Scheyer became the American agent for the Blue Four artists group, an association of Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger.

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The Galka Scheyer Collection consists of 457 artworks, 310 of them by the Blue Four, plus an archive including the artists’ correspondence. Excerpts from their writings, posted alongside the artworks, provide a compelling social context.

As we see--and read--in the exhibition, modern art was on a fast track to the future in the early to mid-20th Century, while Europe was riding a roller coaster through two world wars. Forward-looking artists in Germany were caught up in the exhilaration of avant-garde exploration and the repression of a hostile totalitarian government.

Kandinsky left Moscow permanently in 1922, when Socialist Realism became the official style in Russia. He taught at the Bauhaus in Germany until the Nazis closed the school of modern art in 1933. Most of his works in the show are from the Bauhaus period.

Credited with creating the first completely non-objective painting, in 1910, Kandinsky was deeply concerned with the concept of abstraction and its lack of acceptance. “I wish ‘abstract’ painting would be called ‘real.’ That clumsy word ‘abstract’ has brought about many unpleasant misunderstandings which have a very damaging effect, even today,” he wrote in 1931 to Scheyer.

Two years later in another letter to Scheyer, he quoted Hitler as saying, “Modern artists are either swindlers (of money!)--and so they belong in prison--or else they are dedicated fanatics (of ideas!)--and so they belong in an insane asylum--we must make the choice!”

Believing that there were “three big guns constantly trained on me” (the facts that he was Russian, an abstract painter and a former teacher at the Bauhaus), Kandinsky moved to Paris where he remained until his death in 1944.

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Despite his uprootedness, Kandinsky exerted a tremendous force on modern art through his own art, his teaching and his writing. He talked of the “mysterious” but “purposeful” way that abstract art comes into being--not as a replication of things seen but as an emotional and spiritual essence. Which is not to say that his art contains no connections to nature.

In “Open Green,” a striking 1923 canvas, vignettes of mountain peaks, waves, suns, moons, buildings and a floating figure coalesce in a dreamlike vision. It’s an immensely likeable picture, so full of life and imagination that one may fail to notice the careful dynamics of a composition based on overlapping triangles.

This penchant for dynamic compositions that swirl around the center of a page or dance across diagonals continues in a set of 12 “Small Worlds” prints done in 1922 at the Bauhaus and in several vividly colored lithographs. Some other works portray floating circles, triangles and rectangles that seem to hang in an ethereal space. These pieces convey a profound silence and meticulous balance, but Kandinsky is better known for abstractions that seem to reverberate with cosmic energy.

In simplest terms, Kandinsky’s path to abstraction can be said to follow a course from imaginative figuration and Russian folk sources to compositions of geometric shapes and organic fragments--and from richly brushed, soft-edged forms to crisp, rather mechanistic compositions. The exhibition called “The Path to Abstraction” is more complicated, for it actually portrays a forked road.

Works by Klee, Jawlensky and Feininger are full of recognizable images, altered by intuitive, relatively romantic sensibilities. Klee gives us enchanted gardens and dream-world creatures that might have been seen through sunspots or a kaleidoscope. The 1918 watercolor, “Leaf of a Sheet of a Conception,” for example, depicts a cluster of heads and odd little people in a house-like capsule.

Jawlensky painted cropped views of fertile gardens and abstracted a frontal view of an archetypal human face in dozens of ways, as if he could see the entire world in this image. Six of them in the current show run from jewel-like personages to murky abstractions in which a few dark brush strokes stand for a human presence.

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Feininger’s exhibited works are predominantly images of boats and the sea, plus a few cityscapes. These spare, angular images are worked out in a raspy line and the gentlest suggestion of color.

On the other side of the gallery, works by El Lissitzky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers take a rational, intellectual route to abstraction--echoing that aspect of Kandinsky’s work as well the influence of Cubism. Lissitzky’s “Prouns,” an acronym for the Russian equivalent of “Project for the Affirmation of the New,” are angular configurations that argue against traditional perspective. Depicting volumes as transparent planes, these forms also suggest a way of seeing from multiple viewpoints.

Three of Moholy-Nagy’s works from the mid ‘20s illustrate his ability to wrest visual tension from a few strategically weighted forms. Prints from Albers’ well-known “Homage to the Square” series offer examples of his study of color as form in subtle variations.

The museum is open Thursdays through Sundays, noon to 6 p.m.

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