my favorite painting
Sybil McLain Marketing Director, Street Dixon Rick Architecture
M
y father, Max, had a lifelong fascination with art and architecture.
Two years later, traveling with friends in Paris, I decided to visit one of my favorite places there, the Georges Pompidou Center, which—I had not remembered—has a library named after Kandinsky. They let me in (without a research permit) and within fifteen minutes, the mystery was solved. We located the brochure from
Photo: anthony scarlati
This definitely influenced me as now I’m working in marketing—in architecture. Dad dabbled in painting, and we had a small collection of short biographies of famous painters, filled with many colorful photos of their works. Four years ago, going through his things after he died, I rediscovered a copy of a Kandinsky painting that Dad had painted himself. It had been displayed in our home for many years but had fallen by the wayside and was tucked into a back closet. I kept it and had it framed, thinking it would make a nice conversation piece. Really curious to learn more about the original work, I searched all the biographies I could find on Kandinsky and searched the Internet too. I just could not locate an image of the original. I gave up.
the only known (at that time) exhibit in the United States, at the Guggenheim in 1996. The original painting belonged to a private collector in Europe and had only been exhibited once in the United States. My dad and mother had seen it at the Guggenheim in 1966, and Dad had taken a picture of it—in color—which we can’t find. The research assistant brought me a brochure from the 1966 exhibit, and there it was—in black and white: Stability, originally painted on glass, in 1936.
Reproduction of Kandinsky’s Stability
102 | November 2O11
by Max McLain
NashvilleArts.com | ArtNowNashville.com
When I look at the painting, it makes me smile because my dad always thought it was funny that he never quite finished the copy. There are a few white lines not yet filled in . . . and that makes me think of his great sense of humor.