by Jon Lackman | 12 July 2006 | Modern, Museums
In the land of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, the synaesthetic trailblazer of pure abstraction gets a thorough look at decades-long last. At the Tate Modern, Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction shows 74 works. Picking up ten years after the artist’s 1895 epiphany in front of a Monet haystack, the show climaxes around 1914, before settling into formulaic repetition that reflects the dashing of Kandinsky’s millenarian hopes (the show mercifully cuts off after 1922). Critics cock an eyebrow or two at the artist’s improbable Theosophist metaphysics, but differ on the ultimate results. Reviews by Guy Duplat (“a powerful and spiritual universe”), Ossian Ward (“Sceptics have dismissed synaesthesia as nothing more than subjective invention, like a bad case of metaphor affliction”), Andrew Graham-Dixon (“a life that often seems to have resembled that of a charismatic priest as much as that of a painter”), Laura Cumming (“His paintings are still infested with damsels, cossacks and kitsch angels blowing outsize trumpets … Even when testing hardcore abstraction, courtesy of Malevich, he is still given to painting knights on white chargers – on glass, no less – and aristocratic ladies in crinolines”), and Waldemar Januszczak (“[Composition VII, 1913] is one of the most astonishing pieces of tipping-point abstraction you will ever see. Ten feet wide, seven high, this huge and hugely busy painting darts hither and thither across the wall like a swarm of drunken hummingbirds”).
