Kandinsky Returns to LaM as Museum Reopens With a Major Exhibition on the Images Behind Abstraction
When LaM in Villeneuve d’Ascq reopens after a year and a half of renovation, it will do so by turning the spotlight on a question that still shadows modernism: how did abstraction actually take shape on the artist’s desk, in the studio, and in the classroom? A new exhibition, “Kandinsky and Images,” co-organized with the Centre Pompidou, runs from February 20 to June 14, 2026, and proposes an unusually concrete answer.
Conceived jointly by LaM and the Centre Pompidou, the show offers what the organizers describe as an unprecedented look at the role of photographs, prints, and both popular and scientific iconographies in the development of Wassily Kandinsky’s (Russian, 1866–1944) visual language. The exhibition is also a symbolic meeting point for two institutions in transition: both LaM and the Centre Pompidou are engaged in large-scale renovation projects.
At the core of the presentation is a body of personal archives largely preserved at the Kandinsky Library at the Centre Pompidou. Visitors will encounter photographs, press clippings, scientific illustrations, teaching materials, and a teaching image library that, on this scale, is being shown in France for the first time. Rather than treating these documents as peripheral ephemera, the exhibition places them in direct dialogue with paintings and drawings, framing them as evidence of how Kandinsky’s abstraction was constructed — visually, methodically, and over time.
The curatorial team brings together Jeanne-Bathilde Lacourt, curator of modern art at LaM; Angela Lampe, curator in the Modern Collections Department at the Musée national d’art moderne/Centre Pompidou; and art historian Hélène Trespeuch, associate curator. Their approach positions Kandinsky at the intersection of imagery drawn from mass culture, scientific sources, and spiritual thought, arguing that his abstract forms did not emerge in isolation but were continually tested against a wide field of visual references.
One of the exhibition’s key anchors is the image library Kandinsky assembled while teaching at the Bauhaus between 1925 and 1933. Nearly 200 printed images, cut from 1920s magazines, were used as teaching aids in his courses and as a working tool for thinking through the dynamics of form, rhythm, and structure. In the context of the exhibition, this archive is presented not as a curiosity but as a sustained laboratory for ideas that would sharpen his theoretical concepts and refine his abstract vocabulary.
Organized in sections that track the main stages of Kandinsky’s career, the exhibition pairs major works with their surrounding visual ecosystem. Among the paintings highlighted are “Tableau à la tache rouge” (1914), “Improvisation 3” (1909), “Impression V (Parc)” (1911), and “Avec l’arc noir (Mit dem schwarzen Bogen)” (1912). Around these canvases, the show introduces source images including photographs of Russian landscapes, troikas, and riders — motifs that, the curators suggest, persist even as representation begins to dissolve. The effect is to make visible the tension between the recognizable world and the new pictorial order Kandinsky was inventing.
By foregrounding archives and Bauhaus documents alongside canonical paintings, “Kandinsky and Images” reframes abstraction as a practice built from looking as much as from painting. For LaM, the exhibition also sets the tone for its post-renovation chapter: a reopening statement that is less about spectacle than about returning to the mechanics of modern art’s most consequential shift.
“Kandinsky and Images” is on view at LaM (Villeneuve d’Ascq, France) from February 20 to June 14, 2026.
