My friends are no strangers to my rants and rails against the villainies of living in Paris. Iron-lung inducing pollution. Defiantly unreliable public transportation spiced up in the trenches now and again by the old 'suspicious package found on the metro/train/bus' trick or the perfect crescendo of a rush hour timed labor strike. Dour Parisians who, as Ezra Pound observed, resemble "apparitions" with faces like "petals on a wet, black bough." And lets not forget the Eiffel Tour gray weather ten months out of twelve.
But let this be the place where I confess I have a bit of solace, living as I do in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a pampered little pocket on Paris's western edge. Our main drag, Avenue General Charles de Gaulle, is a triumphal parade route leading to the Arc de Triomphe and the streets clustered around it are lined with luscious trees and dappled by graceful mansions, 18th century hotels particuliers, houses that are architectural gems, exclusive gated communities and hidden parks and fountains. Rain or shine, Ferraris, Aston Martins and Jags, vintage and new alike, come out to play on Sundays. Gerard Depardieu and Jean Reno call Neuilly home and so did its most famous former resident and mayor for nineteen years, President Nicolas Sarkozy. In a word - okay, two - Neuilly is très bourgeois.
But living here amongst les Joneses in a 1930's 50 square meter single with my better half, our well-worn metro passes and our far-reaching dream of rolling our own Testarossa around town one day, it's pretty obvious we weren't lured here for the bourgie hype. Although areas of Neuilly suffer from the same piercing traffic and other riffraff that plagues central Paris our petit quartier, bordered by the sprawling Bois de Boulogne on the south and by a sleepy houseboat-lined stretch of the Seine where two green islands meet on the west, is rather serene and idyllic. The woods, or bois, are a verdant playground of footpaths and trails, lakes and waterfalls, gardens and wildflowers, duck ponds and an impressive range of protected wildlife. Peacocks roam freely a five minute walk from my front door, an exotic luxury and a miracle that makes the stone and steel of Paris all but recede into a distant memory. For me the best thing about living in Paris is living on its edge where nature and solitude drown out the chaos of the inner city's harried arrondissements.
Deep in these thoughts yesterday, I was taking in the Kandinsky retrospective at the Pompidou Center in the harried 4th and reflecting on one of Kandinsky's last works, Blue Sky, a charming painting with buoyant, almost embryonic forms floating across an ethereal blue sky. Kandinsky divined giving this painting texture by mixing grains of pigment and sand together, a method that also results in the brilliant effect of forms and sky catching and glimmering in light. Noticing that it was painted in 1940, the same year the Nazis began their occupation of Paris, it occurred to me that perhaps Kandinsky, with only three years left of an extraordinary career plagued by political censure and war, just might have found a haven in my neck of the woods too.
Allow me to explain. Wassily Kandinsky was my neighbor - seventy years ago, that is. From 1934 - 1944, the last ten years of his life, the Russian-born "abstract" Expressionist and Bauhaus messiah lived a block over from mine. 135 avenue General de Koenig in a small sixth floor flat with a makeshift studio in a massive stone building on the Seine. Kandinsky had lived in Paris for a year in the early nineteen hundreds but left it for Munich where his painting thrived and where he would publish his first major theoretical work, On the Spiritual in Art. But as a Russian on the brink of the First World War, Kandinsky was driven from Munich in 1914 and, after a brief stay in Stockholm, he settled in Moscow until 1921. He was able to return to Germany in 1922 to teach at the famed Bauhaus school, pursue and publish his artistic theories and revolutionize painting, but this intense and flourishing period was once again cut short by impending doom. The Nazis officially classified his art as "degenerate" which resulted in driving Kandinsky from Germany and back to France for good. And so it was that in 1933 Kandinsky hung his proverbial hat in Neuilly.
Made possible by a triumvirate of Kandinsky's biggest holders - the Stadtische Gallery, the Solomon R. Guggenheim and the Pompidou Center itself - as well as a handful of other collectors, the Pompidou retrospective is a full spectrum journey through the shifting palettes, planes, shapes, and space of Kandinsky's groundbreaking and mesmerizing work. Defying what is sometimes the case with a seminal artist's retrospective, the size and breadth of this show is far from intimidating or overwhelming. In fact it's precisely the vastness of the collection - 100 paintings (some of which have never traveled or showed before) accompanied by meticulous textual notes on the audio guide and throughout the exhibition - that render it a deliciously intimate portrait of the artist.
A five part chronology, the exhibition is a revelation for those of us who only know the "abstract" Kandinsky and a celebration of the spiritual joy and hope that colored his paintings even in the darkest of times. Kandinsky's early years of European travel between 1896 - 1907 wound down in Paris where in 1906, with vibrant oils on a black background, he painted Colorful Life with clear elements of fauvism and pointillism and featuring subjects and motifs directly from Russian folklore (the Kremlin hovers on a peopled scene from a distant hill above). In 1908 Kandinsky began six prodigious years in Munich that peaked with his first retrospective in 1912. It was during this time that his paintings began to move into the realm of the abstract, becoming an accumulation of edgeless forms and dynamic colors bounding wildly across the canvas as in the near three-dimensional Black Arch or Picture with a White Border.
In 1914, World War One forced Kandinsky from Germany back to Russia, thus facilitating a dramatic shift in his art. Without a studio or materials in Moscow during the war he began drawing and doing small watercolors, a splendid display of which is on exhibition. Kandinsky returned to Germany after the war where from 1922 - 1933 he taught at the Bauhaus, a defining chapter in his life where he expressed, color, shape and the link between them on both canvas and in his theories in a way that transformed the art world forever. While at the Bauhaus he produced numerous works that experiment with geometric and amorphous forms, one of the most important being Yellow-Red-Blue, composed of a score of geometric shapes and angles gathered on the left of a large canvas and juxtaposed with an overlapping mass of varying forms and Rubik's cube-esque blocks of color on the right. The hypnotic Several Circles also from this period features colored spheres with iridescent halos that float like champagne bubbles across a dark, infinite and yet somehow celestial space.
This is the genius of Kandinsky - color, light and shape triumph in his paintings, vanquishing darkness or permitting its intrusion entirely. A color fanatic, Kandinsky intended the use of black in many of his paintings to be "heard" in the same way as an interlude is in music, as the dawn before the arrival of a new world, a new world of color.
I like to think that Neuilly was a sort of Byzantium for Kandinsky at his life's close, a place where, despite the Nazi occupation of Paris, peace dropped slow. In Neuilly, beset by a kind of isolation and with the catastrophe of Nazism and war at his back, Kandinsky composed a twilight symphony of imagined and unencumbered forms and, perhaps having beheld the local peacocks himself, deepened his connection to the spiritual world of color.
Kandinsky at the Pompidou Center
April 8, 2009 - August 10, 2009
Exhibition 11 am - 11 pm.
12 euro (includes access to all Pompidou Center permanent and temporary exhibitions)
1 comment:
ah...lif only the romans knew how to put on a show. You are lucky in that respect to be gone from this place.
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