Kandinsky, Giving Form to the Invisible

Some exhibitions tell the story of an artist; others allow us to witness a revolution. After more than twenty-five years, Palazzo Bonaparte brings Vassily Kandinsky back to Rome: the man who freed colours and forms from the need to represent reality.
More than seventy works, largely from the Centre Pompidou, retrace his journey in five sections, from his figurative beginnings and the Blaue Reiter to the Bauhaus and his Paris years. An exceptional group comes from the legacy of Nina Kandinsky, the artist’s second wife and guardian of his work after his death in 1944, who donated a significant part of the couple’s collection to the Paris museum in 1976.Highlights include The Black Arc (1912), a landmark in Kandinsky’s journey towards abstraction, and Yellow-Red-Blue (1925), where lines, circles and colours seem to form a musical score. This was precisely what Kandinsky sought: a kind of painting capable of stirring emotions like music, without having to depict the visible world. Watercolours, prints, photographs, letters and personal objects also reveal the man behind the artist, while a special focus rediscovers Gabriele Münter, an artist and key figure alongside Kandinsky in the Blaue Reiter movement. A rare opportunity to follow, step by step, the moment when painting began to give form to the invisible.