Mondrian I I Nicholson: In Parrellel, Courtauld Gallery, London

Ben Nicholson, June, 1937

An exciting exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London, shall be taking place early next year (from February to May 2012), exploring the relationship between two enigmatic modernist abstract painters of the early 20th Century...

'The story of the creative relationship between the artists Piet Mondrian and Ben Nicholson is largely untold. Yet during the 1930s they were leading forces of avant-garde art in Europe.

This exhibition will be the first to offer a comprehensive account of the parallel artistic paths charted by Mondrian and Nicholson during this remarkable decade. It will bring together an extraordinary group of paintings and reliefs to show how each artist was driven by a profound belief in the potential of abstract art to attain the highest aesthetic and spiritual power.' 

I'll keep you posted of developments...

Exhibition of early abstractions by Kandinsky at Guggenheim Museum, New York

Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Painting with White Border’, May 1913 and ‘Sketch I’ for ‘Painting with White Border' (Moscow) Guggenheim Museum’s conservation lab © 2011 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

I am not a huge fan of Kandinsky, but I understand his significance as an artist and what he brought to early modernist thinking. This exhibition at the Guggenheim, New York, from 21st October until 15th January 2012 reunites the key early works Kandinsky painted. This particular painting above, entitled 'Painting with White Boarder', was completed nearly 100 years ago. Inspired by a trip the artist took to Moscow at the end of 1912. When he returned to Munich, hanging out with artists who would form 'Der Blaue Reiter' group and where he had been living intermittently since 1896, Kandinsky searched for a way to visually record the “extremely powerful impressions” of his native Russia that lingered in his memory. Over a period of five months, he explored various motifs and compositions in study after study, moving freely between pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, and oil. After he produced at least sixteen studies, Kandinsky finally arrived at the pictorial solution to the painting: the white border.

From the Guggenheim: 'This exhibition, co-organized with the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., will reunite for the first time the Guggenheim’s final version of the painting from May 1913 with twelve related drawings and watercolors and one major oil sketch and will feature the results of an extensive conservation study of the Guggenheim and Phillips paintings. This study revealed a previously unknown painting beneath the surface of the Phillips’s 'Sketch I' for 'Painting with White Border' (Moscow). A rare glimpse into Kandinsky’s creative process, this presentation reveals the gradual and deliberate way the artist sought to translate his ideas into a bold new language of abstraction.

Tracing Kandinsky’s working method through a roughly chronological display of twelve drawings and watercolors and one major oil sketch related to 'Painting with White Border'. According to a May 1913 essay Kandinsky wrote about the picture, later published in an album entitled Kandinsky 1901–1913 (1913), the artist executed the first oil sketch (owned by the Phillips Collection) “immediately upon my return from Moscow in December 1912.” The orientation of his preliminary studies evolved from a vertical to a horizontal format, and he used pencil, pen and ink, and watercolor throughout the many iterations.

Kandinsky explored key motifs reminiscent of his native Russia, including 'the troika' (a three-horse sled) and 'Saint George'. Ultimately the artist executed more studies than he had for any of his previous paintings before resolving the composition with a soft, undulating white border that he compared to a white wave. In his seminal 1911 treatise ('On the Spiritual in Art: And Painting in Particular'), Kandinsky wrote that the color white expresses a “harmony of silence. . .pregnant with possibilities.”

The conservation study supports interpretations of Kandinsky’s working method. For example, the direct application of the brush to canvas of 'Sketch I' implies a more spontaneous technique as compared to the more methodical treatment of the final work, 'Painting with White Border', in which Kandinsky used a graphite pencil to lay out compositional elements before painting. Studies of microscopic samples of paint from both works show that Kandinsky created his own palette out of combinations of as many as ten different pigments per hue.

The conservation team also discovered a previously unknown painting beneath the surface of 'Sketch I' for 'Painting with White Border' (Moscow). The underpainting, a representational landscape with figures, has been attributed to the German artist Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky’s companion from 1903 to 1916, based on its similarity to Münter’s gouache, Garden Concert on view in this exhibition, and a canvas on the same subject in a private collection. While there are few known instances of Kandinsky painting over an existing canvas and no other known instance of him painting over a work by Münter, limited study has been done of Kandinsky’s canvases to date. Future research and conservation analysis may better clarify the attribution of the underpainting.'

Picasso, Miro, Dali-Angry Young Men: The Birth of Modernity

This is a fascinating exhibition on the relationships between the Picasso, Dali and Miro, currently exhibited at the Foundation Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy until 17th July. This exhibition documents the influences each artist had on each other, the wider painting scene in Spain, and in turn, the legacy they left on the culture of the early Twentieth Century and the development of modernism. What is also interesting about this exhibition is how the strong political convictions are explored especially with regard to the early Picasso and Miro pieces, many not exhibited before. there is also some strong abstract, semi-abstract works by both artists. There is a walk through each room here. The show is curated by Eugenio Carmona, Christoph Vitali.

Pablo Picasso 'Harlequin and his Girlfriend' 1901, Pushkin Museum

'The exhibition is dedicated to the early work of Picasso, Miró and Dalí, which played a decisive role in the beginning of modern art in Spain. The exhibition concentrates on Picasso's pre-cubist period 1900 - 1905, whilst Juan Miró's works of 1915-1920 are presented along with Salvador Dali's from 1920-1925, both artists painting in the period before the discovery of surrealism. Each artist will be represented by 25 - 30 masterpieces selected to show aspects of the three artists in their earliest periods, works that are rarely shown in mainstream catalogues and exhibitions. For instance, Picasso's early work was often coloured by his strong political convictions.

Joan Miro 'Poem Painting' c.1925

In Madrid in 1901, Picasso and his anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler founded the magazine Arte Joven (Young Art), which published five issues. Picasso illustrated the journal, mostly contributing grim cartoons depicting and sympathizing with the state of the poor. Miró too understood art as political, and Miró's oft-quoted assassination of painting is derived from a dislike of bourgeois art of any kind, especially when used as a way to promote cultural identity among the wealthy. Specifically, Miró saw Cubism in this way, and he is quoted as saying I will break their guitars, referring to Picasso and Braque's early Cubist paintings. Much younger than Picasso and Miró, Dalí was expelled from the Academia in 1926 shortly before his final exams when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough to examine him. His mastery of painting skills is well documented in his early works, such as the flawlessly realistic Girl at the window, which was painted in 1926. That same year he made his first visit to Paris where he met with Pablo Picasso, whom young Dalí revered - Picasso had already heard favourable things about Dalí from Joan Miró.'