Museum acquisitions round-up: a Kandinsky ‘Improvisation’ and a canvas by Minimalist pioneer Agnes Martin

Improvisation 21 (1911) by Wassily Kandinsky

Hilti Art Foundation, Liechtenstein

In 1909, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) started producing his Improvisations, a spontaneous and, in Kandinsky’s words, “chiefly unconscious” series of pioneering explorations into abstraction. Improvisation 21 was made at a pivotal time for Kandinsky—the year he co-founded Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider) group and published his essay “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”. Only around 30 Improvisations are known to survive, many of them in museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Improvisation 21 was formerly in the renowned collection of Hermann and Marie Lange in Krefeld, Germany, and was bought by the Hilti Art Foundation last year. It is currently on view in the Abstract exhibition at the Hilti Art Foundation until 17 May 2027, alongside other new acquisitions by Carmen Herrera and Mark Rothko.

Tranquility (2000) by Agnes Martin

Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada

Minimalist pioneer Agnes Martin (1912-2004) was born in Saskatchewan in Western Canada. Now Remai Modern has become the first museum in Western Canada to acquire a work by her. The 1.5 sq. m canvas was bought from Pace in New York with funds from the Frank and Ellen Remai Foundation. “Though she spent most of her life away from the prairies, Agnes Martin’s works carry a special connection to this region,” say Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, Remai Modern’s co-executive director and chief executive, adding that the horizontal bands are reminiscent of the “vast expanses where land and sky meet in this province”.

House of the South (1996) by Betty Woodman

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas

Part of a larger expansion of Crystal Bridges’ American craft collection, this large-scale ceramic frieze by the US artist Betty Woodman (1930-2018)—the mother of Francesca Woodman—was previously in the Time Warner Corporate Collection before going to Salon 94 gallery in New York, where the museum acquired it. Jen Padgett, the Windgate Curator of Craft at Crystal Bridges, says the 13ft by 20ft work represents Woodman’s “expression of ceramics on an architectural scale … inspired by architecture in the south of Italy and architectural decorations there”. Woodman thinks like a painter, Padgett adds, “making brushwork and being very expressive, often playing between two dimensions and three dimensions”.