The Potsdam museum’s latest exhibition is a dizzying, whirlwind of artistic revolutions, hurling you – like an overeager dance partner – through the many schisms of Geometric Abstraction. So many “isms”, yet the only narrative ballast coming from the 12 composed paintings by Wassily Kandinsky.
Standing before them, you’ll be surprised by how flat and technical they appear; for all their cacophony of shapes and symbols, they feel remarkably harmonious. There’s the extraordinary Above and Left (1925), with its matrix of arrows and indices, like an infographic mapping of an invisible planetary force. The nebulous beginnings of Geometric Abstraction, with its various collisions with Suprematism and Cubism, make the exhibition a little feckless at the beginning.
It only gets going with the introduction of Josef Albers’ Homage to the Squares, which, like stony-faced bouncers, straddle either side of one the most impactful rooms. There’s a lot to pack in, and, unusually for the Barberini, the walls are unbalanced and overstuffed – not so bad when you have such gold.
The postwar treasures are impressive: a Ben Nicholson white relief (be still my beating heart), a wiry Barbara Hepworth Orpheus, protruding out of its plinth like the sail of an alien ship. Then Frank Stella’s overlapping squares, gloriously rough and raw, which ultimately give way to pulsing waves of Bridget Riley. By the end, Kandinsky’s paintings are long way away from the increasingly lurid, head-spinning experiments in optical illusion.
- Barberini Museum, Humboldtstr. 5-6, Potsdam, Kandinsky’s Universe: Geometric Abstraction in the 20th Century, through May 18, details.
