Black Lines

Skeins of black line and floating patches of glowing color drift across the canvas with no recognizable subject at all - only rhythm, balance, and the interplay of hue and gesture. Wassily Kandinsky, who believed painting could move the soul as directly as music, made Black Lines among his first fully abstract works. Now in the Guggenheim, it is a pioneering moment in the history of art - the complete severing of painting from the visible world, color and line set free to express pure inner feeling, a visual symphony answerable to nothing but itself.