Colour and form online Lectures on Kandinsky and modern art
Colour and form online, featuring Vasily Kandinsky Composition 8 1923, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, by gift
Explore the tumultuous career of Vasily Kandinsky, a central figure in European modernism, in this four-part lecture series presented by cultural historian Rosamund Bartlett.
Born in Moscow, Kandinsky settled in Munich, where he became a seminal pioneer of abstraction on the eve of World War I. Despite the upheavals he endured over the following years, fleeing first Soviet Russia and then Nazi Germany, he remained at the vanguard of modern art until his death in 1944.
In this series, Bartlett will discuss Kandinsky’s wide range of creative experiments as both a theorist and practitioner, and their relationships to movements such as suprematism, constructivism, dadaism and surrealism.
Rosamund Bartlett is a cultural historian with a background in Russia and Eastern Europe whose current interests focus on modernism, opera, and the intersection between politics, history and the arts. She has lectured widely at galleries in the UK, including the V&A and the Ashmolean, written for both The Burlington Magazine and Apollo, and in 2020 contributed an article to the catalogue of the Tate Britain Aubrey Beardsley exhibition.
To book
This online program offers recordings of the Colour and form lectures presented onsite at the Art Gallery.
Viewing links will be emailed from the first date in the online viewing period for each lecture, which is two weeks after the lecture is presented at the Art Gallery.
Colour and form online Lectures on Kandinsky and modern art
22 February – 9 May 2024
Online
Series subscription
$110 non-member
$70 member
Bookings and enquiries: 02 9225 1878
Transaction terms and conditions, including cancellations and refunds
If booking tickets on behalf of others, you are responsible for communicating all correspondence from the Art Gallery Society of NSW to them.
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Weimar to Dessau: Point and line to plane
Kandinsky returned to Germany in 1921 after enduring a period of hardship and artistic isolation in the Soviet Union. Here, first in Weimar and then Dessau, he began teaching in the Bauhaus school, where he would form a close association with Swiss–German artist and fellow teacher Paul Klee. During this time, he also published his second major theoretical work, Point and line to plane, which reveals a pivotal shift in his practice away from colour and towards form. This new focus on geometric shapes is equally clear in his stage adaptation of Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an exhibition, which premiered in 1928.
7 March 2024 – 2 May 2024
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Berlin to Paris: reflections on abstract art
In 1933, Kandinsky and his wife escaped from Nazi Germany to Paris. There, he took part in a lecture with Italian Futurists, although he associated primarily with figures such as André Breton, Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. During this period, Kandinsky’s late work would come full circle by subtly referencing his Russian roots with biomorphic shapes and soft tones. By the time of his death, Kandinsky had been established as one of the most important artists of Solomon R. Guggenheim’s burgeoning art collection in New York.
14 March 2024 – 9 May 2024