Sunday, September 20, 2009

Kandinsky, the Spiritual in Art, and Islamic Contemporary

Something extraordinary happened in the middle of the Kandinsky show, now up at the Guggenheim Museum: I saw contemporary Islamic art.  

In this Russian-born painter's  patterns and curves and iconography, calligraphy emerged, and story, and the power of line and form -- the way calligraphy converges language and line and form and color --  and "the spiritual in art," as Kandinsky called it, pressed out from the canvases and into the marbled light of the museum.  

It is this, I realized, which draws me to contemporary Islamic painting, as well.  It is here, too, this spiritual in art, this symphony of riches.

No comments: