NARRATOR:
Vasily Kandinsky created a visual abstract language that signifies the spiritual nature of the visual world. He called it the “music of the spheres.” In this painting, Open Green, the animated field of colored lines and planes alternate and intersect, acting and interacting like a visual symphony.
In his treatise Point and Line to Plane, Kandinsky translated the first measures of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony into a sequence of tonal points. This pioneer of abstraction wrote:
KANDINSKY (ACTOR):
“Angular lines provide bridges to planes; very acute angles are the ‘hottest,’ and most tense.”
NARRATOR:
Here one such angle appears within a large circle—the form Kandinsky saw as the symbol of the cosmic fourth dimension.
In the distance, a series of circles glow like stars. There are references to landscape too: angular mountain shapes, cloud-like forms, and two rows of wavy lines at the left that suggest water. They evoke memories of the artist’s past, and Russian folk art. Kandinsky was born and raised in Moscow. He left in 1896, but went back from 1914 until 1922, when the Communist party officially turned against abstract art. His published Reminiscences opens by saying that “bright juicy green”, which he used here, was among the first colors that impressed him, at the age of three. He also wrote:
KANDINSKY (ACTOR):
“The totality of outer and inner Moscow, I believe to be the origin of my artistic endeavors. It is my painter’s tuning fork.”
NARRATOR:
Like Paul Klee, Kandinsky taught at the innovative German art school called the Bauhaus. He stayed until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933, and subsequently moved to Paris, where he remained until his death in 1944. Kandinsky’s pictures and his extensive writings have had much influence on 20th-century art.
This work is part of The Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection at the Norton Simon Museum. To hear Tom Brokaw tell the story behind this extensive and important collection, press 3211.
Open Green
1923
Vassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866–1944)
On View
Kandinsky was a trailblazer of modern art, a practitioner of ever-more-radical abstraction and the author of key theoretical works concerned with the spiritual and formal content of art. In Open Green, painted in 1923, his interests in spirituality and form seem to converge in a dreamscape of color and shape at once abstract and gnomically figurative. Born in Russia, Kandinsky was a devoted student of Russian folklore and icon painting, and the conglomeration of swooping shapes—a circle pierced by a long, slender diagonal; two curving, whiskered commas; a receding checkerboard of translucent color—in the upper right-hand quadrant of this composition has sometimes been read as a depiction of the equestrian Saint George, patron of the Russian Orthodox church, holding his lance and shield and galloping into the heavens.
Details
- Artist Name: Vassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866–1944)
- Title: Open Green
- Date: 1923
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 38-1/4 x 38-1/4 in. (97.2 x 97.2 cm)
- Credit Line: The Norton Simon Foundation
- Accession Number: F.1971.4.P
- Copyright: © The Norton Simon Foundation
Object Information
[Galerie Arnold (Ludwig Gutbier), Dresden, acquired from artist by 1936, to];
[Galerie Ferdinand Möller, Berlin, 1936-1939, to];
Rudolf Bauer, Berlin, by February, 1939;
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1939 - (Sotheby's, New York, 20 October 1971, p. 22-23, no. 17)
[Galerie Ferdinand Möller, Berlin, 1936-1939, to];
Rudolf Bauer, Berlin, by February, 1939;
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1939 - (Sotheby's, New York, 20 October 1971, p. 22-23, no. 17)
Kandinsky Paintings and Graphics: Retrospective of Kandinsky's Bauhaus Years
- Norton Simon Museum, 1989-01-19 to 1990-01-14
- Campbell Abdo, Sara, Wassily Kandinsky, p. 23
- Roethel, Hans K. and Jean K. Benjamin, Kandinsky: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings 1916-1944,no. 704
- Barnett, Vivian Endicott, The Blue Four Collection at the Norton Simon Museum,no. 286 pp. 242-243
- Grohmann, Will, Wassily Kandinsky, Life and Work,no. 263, pl. 361 pp. 186, 334, 361
- Grohmann, Will, Der Cicerone, p. 895
- Brommer, Gerald, Exploring Painting, pp. 201, 399
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best,2010, cat. 747 p. 334
- Weiss, Peg, Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman,no. 134 pp. 146-147
- Masterpieces from the Norton Simon Museum,1989, p. 191
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