Where to See Kandinsky: Composition VIII, Several Circles and a Garden Worth Defending

On 8 March 1913, Alfred Stieglitz spent $500 on Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II). It was Kandinsky's only painting in the Armory Show. Stieglitz later explained that he could scarcely justify the expense, but the failure of visitors and organisers to recognise the picture's importance had infuriated him. Buying it was a way to make them look. That seems a better introduction to Kandinsky than the instruction to appreciate abstraction. Someone once had to argue for this particular canvas.

New York: begin inside the garden

The Metropolitan Museum owns Improvisation 27, recorded in Gallery 965 on our autumn 2026 check of 29 September. Its subtitle probably refers to Eden. Among the dark lines and patches of colour, an embracing couple appears three times, surrounded by snake-like forms. You can try finding them, then step back until the figures lose their certainty again. Recognition is only one way of looking; you need not decide that every black stroke stands for a particular creature before spending time with the painting.

Across the New York collections, the Guggenheim's Painting with White Border keeps another place half visible. Kandinsky connected it to his impressions of Moscow. The three diagonal black strokes at upper left refer to a troika; the central turmoil has been interpreted as Saint George on horseback. Once somebody supplies those clues, it is tempting to spend the whole visit decoding. Try the reverse as well. Let the horses disappear into lines and look at how little information is needed to bring them back.

The Guggenheim: a circle is never just a circle

A collector's visit to Kandinsky at the Dessau Bauhaus helped bring Composition VIII into Solomon R. Guggenheim's collection. This is a different proposition from the garden. The painting dates from 1923, when Kandinsky was teaching at the school, and its geometric elements have distinct edges and intervals between them. Follow one line across the surface, noticing each interruption. Then follow a circle. You will take a different route through the same picture, without having to invent a story about what the shapes represent.

Kandinsky's attachment to circles continued in Several Circles, also owned by the Guggenheim. He thought the form could hold opposing forces together, combining centred and off-centre movement. That idea is more useful here than treating the image as a diagram of planets. Compare an isolated disc with one that overlaps another; ask which seems closer and whether that judgement stays fixed. The exercise takes longer than naming the shapes. It also leaves room for disagreement between two people looking at the same patch of paint.

Paris: geometry begins to loosen

When the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, Kandinsky was already testing the limits of strict geometry. The Musée national d'Art moderne owns Yellow-Red-Blue, painted that year. Thin straight lines accompany the yellow area on the left; a blue circle and a bending black line carry more weight on the right. Red intervenes between them. Rather than applying a colour chart to the painting, cover one side of a reproduction, then uncover it. Each half changes the apparent temperature and movement of the other.

The later Sky Blue, in the same collection, contains forms that seem closer to tiny organisms than to instruments from a geometry lesson. Kandinsky painted it in 1940. The milky blue recalls the sky above Mont Valérien visible from his studio; the wartime occupation confined him and Nina to their building in Neuilly. That background makes the floating shapes harder to dismiss as cheerful decoration. Nina gave the picture to the museum in 1976. For a first look, allow the blue between the forms as much attention as the forms themselves.

Saint Petersburg: a flood without an illustration

Kandinsky struggled to free Composition VI, now in the Hermitage collection, from the story of the Deluge that had prompted it. His account gives the sound and emotional force of the word a role in making the picture. Searching only for a boat or a rising waterline therefore misses the problem he was trying to solve. At three metres wide, the canvas gives the struggle room. It rewards looking across the whole field before attempting to separate the smaller forms.

A second Saint Petersburg stop provides firmer historical display information. The Russian Museum recorded Two Ovals, dated 1919, in the Benois Wing, Room 75, on our autumn 2026 check of 28 September. Kandinsky was then back in Russia, where encounters with the avant-garde were changing his use of geometry. Save this work separately from the Hermitage canvas; they belong to different museums and different moments in his life.

For an introduction, I would build a New York day around the Met's garden and enquire about the Guggenheim paintings before choosing a second visit. In Paris, use the two linked works as a collection shortlist and establish their availability individually. Take one question with you, perhaps how a line becomes a horse, and leave enough time to stop asking it.