ROME.- More than twenty-five years after Rome last hosted a major exhibition devoted to Vassily Kandinsky, the Russian-born pioneer of abstraction is returning to the Italian capital in a sweeping retrospective at Palazzo Bonaparte. Opening September 15, 2026 and continuing through February 14, 2027, the exhibition brings together more than seventy works from international museums and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, whose Kandinsky holdings are among the most important in the world.
Produced and organized by Arthemisia in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and curated by Angela Lampe, curator of the modern collections at the Muse national d’art moderne, the exhibition follows Kandinsky’s development from his early figurative work to the radical experiments that helped reshape modern painting. The show also draws on documents, photographs, personal objects and materials from the Bibliothque Kandinsky, offering a more intimate view of the artist alongside the major works.
The exhibition is structured in five sections spanning Kandinsky’s formative years, his Munich period and involvement with Der Blaue Reiter, his return to revolutionary Russia, his years teaching at the Bauhaus and his final period in Paris. Among the highlights is Gelb-Rot-Blau (Yellow-Red-Blue) from 1925, a work in which geometric forms and intense colors are organized with an almost musical rhythm.
Music occupies an important place in the exhibition’s account of Kandinsky’s artistic thinking. Two formative experiences are singled out in the press materials: his encounter with Claude Monet’s Haystacks, which suggested that a painting could move the viewer without faithfully reproducing reality, and his experience of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. The latter helped encourage his belief that painting, like music, could operate without dependence on recognizable objects and instead evoke emotion, memory and inner experience.
That conviction would become central to Kandinsky’s move toward abstraction. In 1911 he founded Der Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc and Gabriele Mnter, helping to establish a language in which color, form and line could function independently from direct representation. Works such as Mit dem schwarzen Bogen (With the Black Arch) from 1912 mark the decisive moment when Kandinsky’s paintings began to move beyond the visible world and toward a more autonomous, expressive vocabulary.
A distinctive element of the Rome exhibition is its attention to Gabriele Mnter, Kandinsky’s companion during his Munich years and an important artist in her own right. Long overshadowed by Kandinsky’s fame, Mnter is presented as a central figure of German Expressionism and the Blaue Reiter circle. A selection of her works is included with supporting documentation designed to emphasize her independent artistic achievement and her role in the development of the early avant-garde.
Kandinsky’s life was repeatedly reshaped by the political upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. The outbreak of World War I forced him to return to Russia, where he participated in the reorganization of cultural institutions following the October Revolution. In 1922 he joined the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he taught and further developed his theories of form, color and composition. After the Nazis closed the school in 1933, he moved to Paris, where he remained until his death in 1944.
The Bauhaus period receives particular attention in the exhibition. Kandinsky was appointed a “master of form” and directed the mural-painting workshop, working alongside some of the leading artists and designers of the period. During these years, his compositions became more geometrically structured, and in 1926 he published his major theoretical work Point and Line to Plane. Between the Bauhaus’s move to Dessau in 1925 and its closure in 1933, Kandinsky produced hundreds of watercolors and paintings.
In Paris, Kandinsky’s art changed again. The stricter geometry of the Bauhaus years gave way to a lighter and more playful visual language characterized by pastel and acidic colors and biomorphic forms. Encounters with artists such as Jean Arp and Joan Mir informed this late development, in which Constructivist rigor met the more organic vocabulary of Surrealism. The exhibition also includes objects and tools from Kandinsky’s Paris studio, helping recreate something of the atmosphere of his final years.
The Rome retrospective has been made possible in part by the temporary closure of the Centre Pompidou for renovation. Thanks to donations and the bequest of Kandinsky’s widow, Nina, the museum holds an exceptionally rich body of the artist’s work, and the exhibition benefits from loans that ordinarily remain in Paris. The Centre Pompidou is currently operating through its international “Constellation” program while its main Paris building undergoes renovation ahead of a planned 2030 reopening.
For Iole Siena, president of Arthemisia, Kandinsky’s return to Rome represents both a major institutional moment for Palazzo Bonaparte and an opportunity to reintroduce the artist to a broad public. She described Kandinsky as one of the great revolutionaries of the twentieth century, an artist who freed painting from the obligation to imitate reality and gave color, line and form the ability to address emotion directly.
The exhibition is held at Palazzo Bonaparte, Piazza Venezia 5, Rome, from September 15, 2026 through February 14, 2027. It is organized by Arthemisia in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and curated by Angela Lampe.
