Five Quartets [Delhi]

Premjish Achari

An extraordinary anecdote from Vasili Kandinsky’s much eventful artistic career would function as an ideal introduction to this review on ‘Five Quartets’ curated by Uma Nair. On a late afternoon in Munich of 1909 or 1910, owing to the fact that Kandinsky was never a keeper of dates, arrived at his studio to invent what we now know as abstract art. The painting which he executed that day appeared to him only as forms and colours. From that moment onwards a fair likeness of the natural world was seen as a stumbling block to the path of art. Kandinsky said: “I knew for certain that the object harmed my picture” and gave an insightful comment on this new phenomenon “the aims (and thus the means) of nature and art are essentially, organically, and by universal law different from each other.” Kandinsky’s nouveau pictorial statement had its resonance across time and space. Abstraction’s presence in modern and contemporary art testifies that it has been able to capture a universal imagination despite its divorce between art and nature. To appreciate abstraction one needs more than artistic open mindedness but also astute eye-sight.