Kandinsky, O'Keeffe and the Rise of Abstraction

Composition 8, Wassily Kandinsky, 1923/Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Two big new shows in New York this fall touch on the moment when abstract art was a very new idea. "Kandinsky", at the Guggenheim, traces the full career of the man who was one of the pioneers of the form. And over at the Whitney, "Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction" pushes aside all those cattle skulls (or most of them) to focus on the importance that abstraction, which she, too, arrived at very early, had for her throughout her career. Good stuff. I wrote about both of them in the new issue of Time.

As an extra added attraction, we also cooked up a slide show of their work.