NEW YORK, NY.- From July 1 through spring 2016, the Guggenheim Museum presents an intimate selection of works by Vasily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow; d. 1944, Neuilly-sur-Siene, France) that trace his aesthetic evolution. The exhibition, on view in the museum’s Kandinsky Gallery, includes paintings selected from the artist’s early beginnings in Munich at the start of the century, the return to his native Moscow with the outbreak of World War I, his interwar years in Germany as a teacher at the Bauhaus, and his final chapter in Paris.

A pioneer of abstract art and eminent aesthetic theorist, Kandinsky broke new ground in painting during the first decades of the twentieth century. His seminal treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), published in Munich in December 1911, lays out his program for establishing an art independent from observations of the external world. In this and other texts, as well as his work, Kandinsky advanced abstraction’s potential to be free from nature. The development of a new subject matter based solely on the artist’s “inner necessity” would occupy him for the rest of his life.