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1984
Stella: Kandinsky's "[[??]] Simple-complex, 1939
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A practical, everyday pictorial axiom of abstraction holds that, if parts of a painting are to have unequal weights it is better that the top half should be heavier than the bottom half. Kandinsky used this axiom in his late paintings to underscore a new mode of pictorial construction, one free of the horizon line of the past and the forward picture plane of the present. Kandinsky's late paintings pound home a theme of levitational, rotatable pictorial structure, at once freewheeling and gyroscopic, seemingly ungraspable, yet solid and available enough to have become a necessary part of the definition of abstract art. Not unexpectedly, a further extension of Kandinsky's constructed spatial energy points to the future. It is unlikely that recent abstract painting can move ahead without considering the lessons of fluid structure evinced in Kandinsky's late work, especially in his paintings of the late thirties.

As it happened, the explosion of abstract painting in America after the Second World War obscured the lesson of Kandinsky's late painting. The flowering of large scale, coupled with the growth of surface awareness made it hard to see and appreciate Kandinsky. In fact, the growth of abstract-expressionism led the art world to praise his earlier work at the expense of the late work. However, it is not my intention here to argue that the late work is better or for that matter even equal to the work of the early and middle periods; rather, I hope to show that this distortion of Kandinsky's career, the result of our culture's seemingly unsupressible evaluative instincts, actually touches on something important as it raises the usual questions of judgment. Partially hidden, perhaps, in the comparison of Kandinsky's late work to the work which succeeded it in America.