Brilliance - and wrenching struggles

Wassily Kandinsky, there’s no denying it, was a heroic figure in a heroic age. If, in Picasso and Matisse, modern art had its two protean, shackle-breaking geniuses, it had in Kandinsky the very embodiment of the avant-garde’s vaulting ambition and swirling idealism. His involvement - not always voluntary - in the new century’s ideological struggles also made him bitterly emblematic of a new kind of historical quandary: utopianism under the intimate thumb of totalitarianism.

Kandinsky was everywhere, all the time: in Germany for the birth of Expressionism, in Russia for the Revolution and the heady years of Suprematism and Constructivism, back in Weimar Germany for the Bauhaus years, and in Paris for the heyday of Surrealism. He contributed to all this and left his mark not just as a painter, but as a thinker.

He was born in Moscow in 1866 and didn’t get going as an artist until he was 30 (he studied law, politics, and economics first). He had a fastidious, instinctively pedagogical streak and was prone to fussiness even as he mounted spirited defenses of artistic freedom.

A fan of Richard Wagner and friend of Arnold Schoenberg, the ground-breaking modernist composer who was also a painter, he equated art with music, with spiritualism, with the possibility of transcendence. He talked about an “absolute art,’’ by which he meant art liberated from the obligation to represent external appearances.

Did Kandinsky father abstraction? The claim is often made. And yet it’s safer to say that he was for a time the most impressive - the most intoxicating, the most febrile - of a cluster of artists from different countries who arrived, via different routes, at abstract art between 1911 and 1916.

He was certainly abstraction’s greatest proselytizer. His various writings, especially “On the Spiritual in Art,’’ which he finished in 1911, profoundly affected the course of 20th century art, including American modernism (the young Georgia O’Keeffe was one of many who changed course after reading Kandinsky). His conviction that freeing colors and lines from representation would inaugurate a purer, almost musical expressiveness that might speak straight to the soul had the seductive force of a cogent new creed.

All this is surely to his credit. So why did Kandinsky ultimately cut such a tragic figure?

If you want to look outside of the pictures, there’s plenty to dwell on: the wrenching, unwished-for emigrations, for instance - from Germany during World War I, from Russia four years after the 1917 Revolution, and then again from Germany under the Nazi threat. There was the death of his infant son from influenza (possibly hastened by malnutrition), the exhausting battles he fought with ideological foes, and the quiet sadness of his final years, spent isolated in Paris, a city occupied by the same Nazis he had tried to flee. Kandinsky fell ill before the Allied Liberation and died less than four months after it.

Plenty of grimness there. But of course there were triumphs, too, and Kandinsky was rarely starved of worldly acclaim. (“The Russian Messiah’’ is how the Berlin art writer Konstantin Umansky described him in 1920.)

It’s only as you slowly ascend through this exhibit, passing by almost 100 paintings spiraling upward in chronological order, and a side gallery devoted to works on paper, that you sense a different tragedy unfolding, as you watch one of the most uninhibited and rapturous artists of all time succumb to, at best, a jaunty kind of graphic design.

Is this “tragic’’? The word is strong. And yet to traverse this exhibition is to watch a truly dispiriting compromise take place, as the powerful idea of painting as a vehicle of high-temperature feeling is subordinated to the chilly notion of painting as rhetoric.

Kandinsky, of course, would never have conceded this. A zealous, proud, and in many ways solitary man, he held fast, at least in his writing and teaching, to the idea of art as free expression and spiritual manifestation.

But the paintings themselves belie him. From about 1921, they devolve into demonstrations. There is something second-hand and fatally self-aware about them. The free rein of instinct gives way to the aridity of intellect.

At the time, Kandinsky was living in Soviet Russia, serving on committees and writing essays with titles like “The Great Utopia’’ and “Program for the Institute of Artistic Culture.’’ Things got worse in the years after 1922 when, fed up with bureaucratic humiliations, he accepted an invitation to join the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany.

There, he became master of the school’s Wall Painting Workshop and taught a course in the theory of form. The ensuing paintings, though consistently inventive in graphic terms and often tantalizingly colored, entirely lack mojo. They look like butterflies pinned behind glass.

So what of the paintings that preceded all this? The curators, led by Tracey Bashkoff, give us more than a good sampling: There are 13 works from the breakthrough year of 1911 alone, and just under 50 from the astonishing period between 1908 and 1919.

On an anthropological field trip to the Russian province of Vologda in 1889, Kandinsky had been exposed to brightly painted peasant interiors. He later claimed: “They taught me to move within the picture, to live in the picture.’’ Later, he fell under the spell of a Monet painting of a haystack and a performance of Wagner’s “Lohengrin’’ - both immersive, self-dissolving experiences.

His own breakthrough paintings are similarly immersive, and, if you give yourself over to them, completely destabilizing. They advance and retreat around the putative line separating representation and full-blown abstraction, clinging to partially encrypted motifs like a horse and rider, a rowing boat, suns, chimneys, and mountains, before finally dispensing with them altogether. (Tellingly, Kandinsky once claimed he had arrived at abstraction after returning after dark to his studio. He admired a particular effect in one of his paintings only to discover that it was upside down.)

Some works, like “Fugue’’ (1914) or “Small Pleasures’’ (1913) - their ink-blot effusions in shimmering blue-greens and yellow-mauves overlaid with tentacled shapes, cross-hatching, arcs, and diagonals - attain a congested intensity that feels not just unprecedented but unrepeatable. The colors pulse and dilate. The black lines, straight and wavy, singular and repeated, set up sloshing vectors of liquid force. All feels haphazard, uncomposed, weirdly beautiful.

Kandinsky was, when all is said and done, a child of 19th-century Romanticism. This put him at odds with fellow innovators of the 20th century who, one by one, sloughed off Romanticism’s cult of feeling, its emphasis on spiritual yearning, its bug-eyed faith in nature. Many of them, understandably, felt Romanticism was no longer tenable in an age warped by industrialization, mass urbanism, and the nihilism of war.

But Kandinsky had thought about this; he believed the emotional impulse at the heart of Romanticism should be the premise of all art.

“It is no part of my programme to paint with tears, or to make people cry, and I really don’t care for sweets,’’ he wrote, in one of the most powerful statements ever made by an artist, “but Romanticism goes far far beyond tears. . . . The meaning, the content of art is Romanticism, and it is our fault if we mistake a temporal phenomenon for the whole notion.’’

These words almost redeem the tragedy - or perhaps it is merely the pity? - of Kandinsky’s long decline. They resounded in the 1940s in America, when such artists as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning dared to place their faith in the power of paint to express feeling. And they resound with almost accusatory force in today’s dispirited art world, awash as it is in trite, undergraduate ideas, embarrassed by feeling.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com