Kandinsky

by Marcel Brion

Kandinsky's influence onmodern art has been incalculable, and shows no sign of lessening. His importance lies in his writing as well as in his painting. In both, he presents a conception of art that is radically different from traditional attitudes. He finds that devotion to material objects interferes with the intuition of the painter, who should obey his inner promptings; should be free to create his own time and space, with their own laws. All the qualities of this art would come from the works themselves, and especially from the artistic mediums and substances. Far from being "abstract," art would then be the more "concrete"—each work a definite, newly created entity that does not depend, for vitality, on reference to something outside itself. Thirty-five color reproductions of Kandinsky's fascinating work are presented here, along with quotations from his writing. The text by Marcel Brion, a leading French authority on modern art, is a fine, extremely readable introduction.

94 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Marcel Brion (1895, Marseille - 1984, Paris) was a French essayist, literary critic, novelist, and historian.

The son of a lawyer, Brion was classmates in Thiers with Marcel Pagnol and Albert Cohen. After completing his secondary education in Champittet, Switzerland, he studied law at the Faculty of Aix-en-Provence. Counsel to the bar of Marseille between 1920 and 1924, he abandoned his legal career to turn to literature.

Brion wrote nearly a hundred books in his career, ranging from historical biography to examinations of Italian and German art, and turning later in life to novels. His most famous collection of stories is the 1942 Les Escales de la Haute Nuit (The Shore Leaves Of The Deepest Night). An essay of Brion appears in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, the important 1929 critical appreciation of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

He was a friend of the philosopher Xavier Tilliette.

In 1964, Brion was elected to the French Academy chair 33, replacing his friend Jean-Louis Vaudoyer. Other distinctions include membership in the Légion d'honneur, the Croix de guerre 1914-1918, a Grand Officer in the French Ordre national du Mérite, and an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

His son, Patrick Brion, critic and film historian, is the "voice" of Cinema midnight on France 3.