Abstract Icons

Wassily Kandinsky was one of the first modern artists to put abstraction into the visual vocabulary of 20th century painting. Yet roots of Kandinsky's modernism lie more in the soul than in any scientific mood. For him, folk art with its romance and spiritual energy was a vital source, just as it was for his contemporary Stravinsky, who made brightly violent music, such as The Firebird, out of traditional Russian folk tales, and the sculptor Brancusi, who derived his mythical Maiastra bird from a Rumanian fairy tale.

To celebrate the centenary of the artist's birth, Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum last week opened an exhibit concentrating on Kandinsky's Hinter-glasbilder, works painted in a folk art tradition on the reverse side of glass panes. These highlight both Kandinsky's delight in folk imagery and his inexorable surge toward nonobjective art.

Orthodox Unorthodoxy. Kandinsky was first introduced to glass painting by his onetime pupil, longtime mistress and painting companion, Gabriele Munter, who had copied the traditional technique from glass paintings she had discovered in the Bavarian town of Murnau, where the two eventually settled. It is a difficult medium; details and glazes are brushed on first, the background pigments next. As the colors are enhanced through the refraction of the glass, the lustrous surfaces glow like medieval icons. Kandinsky, a lifelong Eastern Orthodox, instantly took to his new-found art form, even decorating the frames to give his works a handcrafted look.

Kandinsky felt free to admit humor into his cartoonlike paintings. In Resurrection (see opposite page), a kneeling figure with acidic red, green and black tresses holds his hands over his ears while the trumpet of the Apocalypse sounds. There is a wit, a gay stylization, a fluid jumble of forms without regard to gravity that Marc Chagall continued in his secularized icons on canvas.

Kandinsky's art became more and more severe in the 1920s, while he was teaching at Germany's famed Bauhaus. Only a few essential traces of serpentine exuberance remain in Stability. He had turned to the excessive discipline that he believed abstraction demanded. But the roots remain visible. Out of the icons of his native Russia and the glass paintings of Bavaria, Kandinsky had opened for himself a new perspective.

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