ART : Chaos and Crescendos : Kandinsky’s surviving ‘Compositions’ are reunited, providing a fresh portrait of the artist as a complex man.

In 1889, a young Russian student of law and ethnography named Vasily Kandinsky made a state-sponsored expedition to northeastern Siberia to study the customs of the Zyrians, a Finno-Ugric tribe. Years later, Kandinsky, the artist, described the experience in his “Reminiscences”:

“I shall never forget the great wooden houses covered with carvings. . . . They taught me to move within the picture, to live in the picture. I still remember how I entered the living room for the first time and stood rooted to the spot before this unexpected scene. . . . Every object [was] covered with brightly colored, elaborate ornaments. Folk pictures on the walls: a symbolic representation of a hero, a battle, a painted folk song. The ‘red’ corner [ red is the same as beautiful in Old Russian] thickly, completely covered with painted and printed pictures of the saints. . . . I felt surrounded on all sides by painting, into which I have thus penetrated.”

“Kandinsky: Compositions,” opening today and continuing through Sept. 3 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is a small exhibition that conveys an immense sense of abstract painting as an all-enveloping thing. The exhibition--organized by Magdalena Dabrowski, senior curator in the department of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it was seen last winter and spring--reunites for the first time six of the seven surviving “Compositions” that Kandinsky considered his most important works.

Dabrowski, who was born in Poland, has succeeded where all others have failed in bringing together the surviving “Compositions.” Although not a Kandinsky specialist, she has been interested in the artist since writing a paper in graduate school in the 1970s on the artist’s work and its relationship to Old Russia. Observing that the field was full of art historians working on Kandinsky dissertations, she wrote about Russian Constructivism instead and went on to organize a retrospective at MOMA in 1991 of the paintings and designs of Russian woman artist Liubov Popova. Through her contacts in Russian museums, Dabrowski was able to secure the loans for the current show.

“Composition VI” has never been seen in this country, and “Composition VII” has rarely been on view, even in Russia, during the past 30 years. Altogether the show offers a unique opportunity to view watershed works by a master whose subsequent influence on everyone from painter Arshile Gorky to designer Emilio Pucci can be felt to this day.

Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) is best remembered, however, as a German Expressionist, one of the founders of the Blaue Reiter group in Munich in 1911 and a leading teacher at the Bauhaus in the 1920s.

The LACMA exhibition alters this familiar terrain by giving a new picture of the artist as ethnographer, spiritual medium and Symbolist aesthete. Kandinsky emerges as one of the first abstract field painters, a precursor of Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still. Yet his towering abstractions, some measuring almost 7 feet high and 10 feet long, can also be decoded as history paintings, full of abstruse symbolism and apocalyptic themes.

In their sweeping and thoroughly rehearsed pictorial organization, the “Compositions” suggest a symphonic fullness. Beginning with their very name, they are replete with references to music. Kandinsky was an ardent fan of German composer Richard Wagner, and it was a performance of the opera “Lohengrin” in Moscow in 1896 that propelled the 30-year-old lawyer and ethnographer to move to Munich and become an artist. There he studied painting with Symbolist Fran Van Stuck.

Later, as a co-editor of the Blaue Reiter Almanach, Kandinsky published a colleague’s article on Alexander Scriabin’s orchestral work “Prometheus: A Poem of Fire” (1908). The Russian composer of shimmering glissades was interest ed in finding correspondence between tones in color and music. As Dabrowski writes in the exhibition catalogue: “These tonal theories parallel Kandinsky’s desire to find equivalences between colors and feelings in painting.”

The artist was also an admirer of composer and painter Arnold Schoenberg, whose 12-tone harmonies and theories of “developing variation” in chromatic structure find affinities in the close-valued colors and open, spiraling forms of the “Compositions.”

In less palpable ways, these paintings reflect the artist’s preoccupation with spiritualism.

“Compositions” V, VI and VII persistently treat the themes of the Last Judgment and the Deluge. In the years right before World War I, the artist believed that the world was on the brink of a “third Revelation” that would wash away all sins and reveal a new age, “the Great Spiritual.” Kandinsky was acquainted with the writings of his compatriot Madame Blavatsky and heard, in 1908, theosophist Rudolf Steiner lecture in Berlin.

In 1911, the artist himself published a famous treatise, “On the Spiritual in Art,” which, despite its status as one of the chestnuts of modern art education, still makes for rather difficult reading today. (Kandinsky’s book even lent its name to LACMA’s 1986 show “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985,” an exhibition that provoked a spasm of interest in all things spiritual in late-’80s art.)

Now Kandinsky is poised to be recast, yet again, in the guise of a Joseph Beuys: the artist as shaman. Following the research of art historian Peg Weiss, who is about to publish “Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman” (Yale University Press, due this month), Dabrowski accounts for this new interpretation in the catalogue:

“Kandinsky’s attraction to the native folk art of the Zyrian people from the remote Vologda region and its profound special motifs, often both religious and shamanistic, offered him a vocabulary with which to identify himself as a shaman, an intercessor between the earthly and the spiritual.”

A s portentous allegories full of Sturm und Drang , the “Com positions” can also be read as abstracted battle paintings, even as premonitions of war.

The first three “Compositions” (all from 1910) are thought to have been destroyed in World War II. But, Dabrowski said in an interview, “some hope exists that ‘Compositions’ II and III, which both belonged to the Botho van Gamp collection in Berlin, may yet turn up on the lists of works confiscated during the war in Russia.”

“Composition I,” almost certainly destroyed in a fire in Braunschweig, Germany, in 1944, depicted frolicking horsemen and recalls Kandinsky’s early Art Nouveau compositions of dashing knights and damsels. “Composition II,” for which a highly finished sketch exists, features a jumping rider and hedonistic reclining figures in a garden. For this work Kandinsky clearly had been looking at Matisse, whose “Le Bonheur de Vivre” (now in the Barnes Collection) he saw in Paris in 1906.

The bucolic mood of the painting also reflects the fact that the artist and his companion, painter Gabriele Munter, were spending large amounts of time in the sub-alpine village of Murnau, outside Munich during this period. Dabrowski also mentions that the couple at this point were members of a Dionysiac circle in Munich, advocating free love and unbridled drinking. (A charming book about the ill-starred affair, “Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Munter: Letters and Reminiscences, 1902-1914” was published by Prestel last year.)

“Composition III” was the most abstract of the early works, with horses and mountains boiled down to swooping arcs and mounds. In the LACMA show, it is represented by original diagrams charting the exact placement of the colors: Kandinsky’s careful planning suggests an unexpected, non-humorous precedent for Andy Warhol’s series of paintings from 1962, such as “Do It Yourself” and “Dance Diagrams.”

“Composition IV” (1911) is pretty definitely an Orientalist battle painting in the Romantic tradition of Theodore Gericault and Eugene Delacroix. In the upper left corner of the painting, we can just make out the shapes of two Cossacks on horseback going at each other with flashing scimitars. Dabrowski, however, points out that the two black verticals dividing the painting into an absolute left and right should be read as lances carried by Cossack figures in little red hats. They look as if illuminated by footlights. Equally theatrical is the rainbow shape at left, which is said to be an evocation of the Rainbow Bridge in Wagner’s “Rheingold.”

“Composition V” (1911) is part of a private collection in Switzerland; unfortunately, because the owner would not extend the loan beyond New York, it will not come to LACMA. But a large painted study from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, indicates the signal device of a black, snaking line, which Dabrowski believes should be read as a trumpet blown by an angel at the Last Judgment.

I n the sixth and seventh works, the forms are even more ab stracted and sometimes defy basic legibility. Both big paintings were done in 1913, just a year before the outbreak of World War I, and the sense of an approaching catastrophe is visceral in their jarring, percussive forms.

“Composition VI,” from the Hermitage, has nacreous pink shell forms and tenebrous arcs near its edges that suggest a biblical storm of abstracted passages of hard-driving rain. “Composition VII,” from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, commands the greatest number of studies, even though the final painting was accomplished in only 3 1/2 days. Here Kandinsky achieves his most drastic, hieroglyphic concision. Dabrowski suggests that the large, orange kite form at high center denotes Elijah descending in his chariot. The rest of the composition, with its shifting perspectives and multiple vortexes, evokes looking up at the sky and down into water all at once.

“Composition VIII” (1923) was painted at the Weimar Bauhaus, after Kandinsky returned from having spent the war in Russia. Its proto-Op Art hieroglyph for the sun conjures up an eerie calm after the storm: Kandinsky evidently believed that the epoch of the Great Spiritual had arrived. “Compositions IX” (1936) and “Composition X” (1939), the last two works, have a hint of something sinister, though with their sherbety colors and biomorphic forms, they may seem more whimsical in tone.

In these works, made after Kandinsky left Germany in 1933 and had settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine outside Paris, there are portents of another dance macabre, anticipating the oncoming horrors of World War II. By this time, Kandinsky had already seen his work banned and vilified in the Nazi Party’s notorious exhibitions of “Degenerate Art,” a subject elaborately explored at LACMA in the 1991 show “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany.”

“Composition IX” may evoke the kind of biological experiment the Nazis conducted in the concentration camps. And “Composition X” has been compared by Weiss to a shamanistic drum. Nevertheless, both works come full circle back to Kandinsky’s early Art Nouveau manner and end the exhibition on an exuberant note.

* “Kandinsky: Compositions,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Tue s days-Thursdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Ends Sept. 3. (213) 857-6000.