Thirty 1937

Wassily Kandinsky made “Thirty” with oil on canvas, and it’s a wild grid of black and white squares, each holding its own little party of shapes. The contrast is so stark, so graphic; it’s like he’s challenging us to see how much visual information we can process. I love how the black paint seems almost poured, staining the canvas in some areas and sitting thick on top of the ground in others. Look at the square in the upper left. See how the white line appears to sit on the black, like a drawing? It reminds me of a Calder mobile, or maybe even playful sketches in a notebook. Kandinsky was always chasing the spiritual in art, and you can see how he lets the process guide him, embracing the ambiguity and letting the conversation between shapes unfold. It’s like he’s saying, “Hey, art’s an ongoing experiment; let’s see where it takes us.”