The visitor is obliged to follow in sequence through this well-spaced show as if sharing in its difficult voyage. Without question, Kandinsky meant his ten huge canvases, each one called Composition , to soar. As a New Yorker, I knew the second from an oil sketch in the Guggenheim Museum . I could never have imagined where it was to lead. As with Lawrence's migrants, the price of freedom is that one can hardly find one's bearings.
Colors become intense primaries, filling in the sketchiness of the early drawing.
The handling varies from thick streaks to a characteristic soaked color, almost like watercolor. The dense drawing links the earlier schematic images, carries the eye past them, and finally buries them in a torrent of color. Lawrence, I had to admit, could hardly have dreamed of this virtuosity. Scale matters, and not only because the size is overwhelming. In the open fields, an afterthought can easily become a further layering, like graffiti.