Kandinsky from Japanese Collections at Nagano Prefectural Art Museum

Composed Vibration: Wassily Kandinsky from the Collections in Japan follows the career of Wassily Kandinsky through paintings held in Japanese collections alone. Nothing travels in from Europe or America. The show draws on what museums and private owners in Japan have gathered over the decades, and it arranges those works into five chapters that run from his early years to his last.

The first chapter covers the Munich years and the Russian imagery that stayed with him there. Kandinsky was born in Moscow and settled in Munich in 1896, studying first at Anton Azbe’s private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts. ‘Arrival of the Merchants’ (1905) belongs to this period. The second chapter follows the path to abstraction and the Blue Rider, the years when Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in Western art.

A third chapter turns to his reception in Japan, which explains why so many of his works ended up in collections there. The fourth moves to the Bauhaus and geometry. Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 until the Nazis closed the school in 1933, and ‘Without Support’ (1923) comes from that era, as does ‘Floating’ (1927), where circles and lines drift across the canvas.

The final chapter looks at his late Paris period. After leaving Germany, Kandinsky moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life. The works in this chapter show how his compositions shifted during his final years in France. Seen together, the five chapters let visitors follow a Russian painter and art theorist from figurative scenes to compositions built from pure form, using works that Japanese collectors and institutions have kept close.