Kandinsky Cut Ties With Russia. So Did This Museum.

When the Hermitage Amsterdam cut ties with the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it could have seemed like the Dutch museum was turning away from Russian culture, or even Russian artists.

After all, the Dutch museum had spent 15 years showcasing masterpieces from the Russian institution, with exhibitions devoted to the Hermitage’s founder, Catherine the Great, and the House of Romanov, as well as the blockbuster “Jewels! The Glitter of the Russian Court.”

But Annabelle Birnie, who runs the Amsterdam museum, doesn’t want anyone to be confused about the reasons for the split from its former exhibition partner. “Russian art was never part of the decision,” she said. “It was an economic boycott,” that “had nothing to do with the quality of Russian art and Russian artists,” she added.

Emphasizing this point is at least part of the reason the directors of the museum, which was renamed H’Art last year, decided to inaugurate its new identity on Wednesday with a retrospective of a Russian-born artist whose career was shaped by the forces of war and nationalism, and who also severed ties with his homeland: Wassily Kandinsky.

The show, which runs through Nov. 10, presents some 60 paintings by the artist, all but two of which come from the Pompidou Center in Paris, which owns a vast trove of around 1,300 items, including his artworks, archives and the contents of his studio, donated by his widow, Nina Kandinsky.