Wassily Kandinsky Painting with Red Spot (1914)

Louisiana exhibition poster featuring the work, Painting with Red Spot (1914), by the Russian artist, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). The poster was printed in connection with the Louisiana exhibition in 1971 with Kandinsky and his close friend, German-Swiss, Paul Klee (1879-1940). The two friends had a decisive influence on modern, non-figurative painting and with the museum’s exhibition in 1971 it was only the second time that the two artists’ works were presented simultaneously.

Post-war art would have looked different without the fruitful experiments of Klee and Kandinsky. Kandinsky with his pure form and color expressionism, Klee with his poetic fantasy art. Klee and Kandinsky were of great importance for the development of Danish abstract art in both the 30s and 40s.

Together with a few other artists, the two created a painterly language whose syntax was new and unknown. Not least in the interaction between the two artists’ workswhich Louisiana’s exhibition offered an opportunity to seeone could become familiar with parts of modern art history. Kandinsky’s first, abstract watercolor from 1910 and Klee’s last picture from 1940 mark important fixed points.

Kandinsky left Russia in 1922 and at the Bauhaus school in Weimar he had Paul Klee as a colleague. It became one of the most fruitful and enduring friendships in modern art, with the two working and exhibiting in parallel through some of the most defining years of their careers.