ART REVIEW : Under the Abstract Spell of ‘Kandinsky: Compositions’ : Only 15 Works Are at LACMA, but It Is Still a Show Not to Be Missed

Only 15 paintings are included in “Kandinsky: Compositions,” the much-anticipated exhibition organized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art that opened Sunday at the LosAngeles County Museum of Art, its only other venue. The show is small.

However, because two of the 15 rank among the greatest of all early 20th-Century Modern paintings, both of them on loan from museums in Russia, there’s ample reason to regard this compact little dazzler as a show not to be missed. Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), the Russian pioneer of abstract painting, devised an immensely sophisticated visual language with which to articulate a highly personal, even kooky spiritual philosophy. His monumental “Composition VI” and “Composition VII,” painted in Germany just eight months apart in 1913, together represent the peak of that profound and influential achievement.

The show is a tightly focused study of the genesis of 10 paintings, made between 1910 and 1939. The artist gave the name “Compositions” to this handful of now-celebrated works. A term with musical connotations, it suggests a carefully wrought aggregate of disparate ingredients. It speaks to Kandinsky’s desire to create for painting an enveloping, holistic, almost Wagnerian artistic form.

Abstraction, with an emphasis on the intricate orchestration of painterly color, was the means the artist slowly developed for accomplishing his aim. The result, in paintings such as “Composition VI” and “Composition VII,” is as explosive and sensuously moving as any figurative altarpiece from the Mannerist or Baroque eras.

Only seven of the 10 “Compositions” survive (numbers I, II and III did not make it through World War II), and they’ve never before been shown as a group. Six are now assembled at LACMA, together with some two-dozen oil studies and related drawings and prints.

The museum’s galleries are laid out chronologically. Following an introductory room, with prints and paintings from LACMA’s collection on hand to demonstrate some of the numerous sources on which Kandinsky drew--Russian folk art, Jugendstil (the German brand of art nouveau design), among them--each of the 10 “Compositions” is examined in more depth.

The two most fully articulated pictures are “Composition IV,” a bold, vibrant, folkloric landscape dotted with castles and populated by dramatic Cossacks, which is accompanied by six drawings and a magnificent oil study; and “Composition VII,” the great apocalyptic apparition, which is joined by seven studies, four on canvas and three on paper.

There’s a visionary dreaminess to all of Kandinsky’s “Compositions”--unsurprisingly, given their origins in Russian Orthodox divinity and theosophical mysticism. This ethereal effect was not achieved haphazardly. Rational, thoughtful underpinnings for this emotive, Expressionist art are plainly evident in the wonderful drawings, which are carefully plotted studies in pencil, charcoal, India ink and watercolor.

Frequently, even the smallest detail of a monumental canvas was diagramed in advance, while the finished painting manages to retain a buoyant sense of spontaneity. The pictorial power of Kandinsky’s art partly derives from this remarkable sense of poise, as internal contradictions are held in perfect balance.

Seven “Compositions” were painted in less than three years time, between January, 1910, and November, 1913. Long gaps separate the rest.

Number VIII dates from 1923, number IX from 1936 and number X from 1939. There’s a huge difference between the painterly Expressionism of the early works and the hard-edged and organic geometry of the later ones, with their debts to Russian Constructivism and French Surrealism.

The difference is more than merely stylistic. The later work is cooler, more descriptive, less demanding.

Born into a prosperous family, Kandinsky began to paint rather late in life (he was 30), after completing studies in ethnography and economics and planning for a comfortable future in academic. Having left the staid security of Moscow to join the intellectual avant-garde of Munich, he was both a mature figure and an explorer on the outer reaches of Modern art when, in his early 40s, he began the “Compositions.”

Equal measures of judicious control and exuberant adventurousness course through the earlier works, endowing them with an inexplicable sense of dangerous monumentality. The great “Composition VI” and “Composition VII” are shockingly modern evocations of traditional Christian themes in Western art, including the Deluge, the Last Judgment, the Resurrection and the edenic Garden of Love.

Idealistically, Kandinsky thought abstraction could universalize these subjects. Even if it doesn’t, their seductive power is undeniable. “Composition VI” creates a visual undertow that’s finally as apocalyptic as any naturalistic deluge drawing by Leonardo.

This exuberant eccentricity disappears from the three later, considerably smaller “Compositions,” becoming didactic and more deliberate--more schoolmarmish. Kandinsky had been forced to return to Moscow at the outbreak of World War I, and he later taught at Germany’s famous school in Weimar, the Bauhaus. When the dark cloud of National Socialism gathered in Germany, he moved to the outskirts of Paris.

When he was working in Munich, though, Kandinsky for the first time was estranged from the security of his Russian homeland. I think of him in Germany as a satellite, connected to Russia by the pull of emotional gravity. Anchored by a psychic tether, he explored, probed and tested the limits, and it shows in his art. There’s a wildness to the work of the early 1910s--not in the sense of sheer abandon, as the careful drawings and studies suggest, but a salutary wildness of spirit.

Kandinsky had seen Matisse’s landmark painting of a modern Eden, “The Joy of Life,” on a 1906 sojourn to Paris, where the picture’s eye-popping chromatic strangeness made an immediate and lasting impression on him. Eventually, however, he grasped the deeper truth of the Matisse, which was that painting could itself embody and create the joy of life.

“The creation of the work of art is the creation of the world,” Kandinsky wrote in 1913, and his two great “Compositions” from that year showed how.

The only disappointment at LACMA is that “Composition V,” which was shown in New York, is absent here. (The one “Composition” still in private hands, it was not allowed to travel; a large, remarkably complete oil sketch is included.) Because the picture is a pivot between the fairy-tale magic of the early “Compositions” and the sweeping grandeur of numbers VI and VII, it is sorely missed.

But don’t let that stop you from spending time with Kandinsky’s amazing visionary abstractions. So far, it’s the best museum show in L.A. this season.

* LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Sept. 3. Closed Mondays.