Abstract pioneer Wassily Kandinsky works featured at Brussels exhibit

PanARMENIAN.Net - A work painted by the abstract pioneer Wassily Kandinsky and once considered lost is making a rare Western appearance in an unusual exhibition in Brussels, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Kandinsky referred to "Picture with a Circle," a 1911 oil, as "my first abstract picture" and "the first abstract picture in the world." It is part of an exhibit at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium to last thorugh June 30. "Kandinsky and Russia" exhibit features some 50 Kandinskys, most from collections in the former Soviet Union.

Part of the collection of the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi, the painting was created in Bavaria, Germany, where Kandinsky was a leading member of the Blue Rider group of artists. The work eventually found its way to the Soviet Union along with the Russian-born Kandinsky, who spent World War I and its revolutionary aftermath there.

Considered lost by art experts for decades, the painting resurfaced in the 1980s, when the Russians themselves began to exhibit the artist for the first time since the Soviet crackdown on modernism in the 1920s.

Kandinsky scholars aren't quite sure how or when "Circle" ended up in Tbilisi. Michel Draguet, a Kandinsky scholar and the Royal Museum's director, thinks the work was sent to Georgia by Kandinsky around 1920. However, the Georgian National Museum believes the painting arrived in 1939 from Moscow.

Kandinskys have done well at recent auctions. Last November, a new top auction price for the artist was set at Christie's when his pre-abstract 1909 painting, "Study for Improvisation 8," fetched $23 million from a European collector.