After breaking with its parent museum in St Petersburg, the Amsterdam art museum H'ART is celebrating its formal reopening with a major Kandinsky exhibition starting in June.
More than 60 works by the famous painter and pioneer of abstract art, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), will be on display from Tuesday onwards when King Willem-Alexander opens the exhibition.
The show also marks the start of a close international collaboration with the Centre Pompidou museum in Paris, as the director of H'ART, Annabelle Birnie, said on Monday.
The Hermitage Museum in Amsterdam broke away from its parent museum, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, in 2022 after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and changed its name to H'ART.
The artworks on display come from the Parisian museum, which has one of the largest Kandinsky collections.
The exhibition follows the painter's life story from his early figurative works and impressionist paintings to his abstract paintings with geometric forms.
"Kandinsky's life story is also the story of abstract art," said curator Birgit Boelens. Crises, wars, revolution and personal strokes of fate influenced Kandinsky. "His story is reflected in the richness and diversity of his art."
Kandinsky grew up in the Russian Empire and, after a brief career as a lawyer, left his homeland in 1896 to become an artist in Germany, where he became one of the co-founders of the Blue Rider group. Kandinsky was also a lecturer at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. He eventually fled Nazism to Paris, where he died in 1944.
The exhibition focuses on abstract masterpieces such as "With the Black Bow" (1912), "In Grey" (1919) and "On White" (1923), as well as the "Salon" with four-metre-high murals in the Amsterdam museum.
Visitors can now enter a work of art themselves. The original, which Kandinsky created with his Bauhaus students in 1922, no longer exists. However, the work was reconstructed in 1977 for the opening of the Centre Pompidou.
After its break with the Hermitage in St Petersburg, the museum is now set to work closely with the Centre Pompidou, the British Museum in London and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C.