Vladimir Kandinsky exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW should put art back into the conversation about the gallery

Tempted to quit the rat race and unleash your inner artist? It worked for Vasily Kandinsky, the subject of a blockbuster exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW from Saturday.

Kandinsky was a lawyer, economist and ethnographer before throwing it all off to become an artist at the age of about 30. By his death in 1944, he was so hot that American tycoon Solomon R. Guggenheim began collecting his work in bulk.), 1910, fetched £37.2 million at Sotheby’s London in March this year – a new auction record for the Russian-born painter.

AGNSW director Michael Brand will be hoping some of that value will manifest in ticket sales . While the gallery opened its $344 million Sydney Modern wing last year, Brand has been criticised for acompared with galleries in Melbourne, Adelaide and Canberra, in particular, and has been accused of turning the gallery into a “function centre”.exhibition until March 10 – in the gallery’s original sandstone building – is thanks to Guggenheim’s personal interest in the modern abstractionist.

The exhibition traces Kandinsky’s life from his creative beginnings in Munich, to his return to his birthplace of Moscow at the outbreak of World War I, followed by the interwar years spent in Germany where he was an instructor at the Bauhaus, and his final experimental chapter in Paris.Megan Fontanella, curator of modern art and provenance at the Guggenheim, says Kandinsky still surprises her after 19 years at the museum.

“Here in Sydney as they’ve been coming out of the crates, sometimes it feels like I’m seeing the paintings for the first time because it has this new life and new context, and I’m seeing passages I never noticed,” Fontanella says.“For Kandinsky, the horse and rider was this symbol of the artist as having this ability to bring us all to this more spiritual plane,” she says.

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