On the Spiritual in Art

by Wassily Kandinsky

106609 McAlister, Hugh The Flight of the Silver Around the World Ab

153 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1946

About the author

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter, and Art theorist. He is credited with painting the first modern abstract works.
Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose to study law and economics. Quite successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat—he started painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.
In 1896 he settled in Munich and studied first in the private school of Anton Azbe and then at the Academy Of Fine Arts in Munich. He went back to Moscow in 1914 after World War I started. He was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow and returned to Germany in 1921. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived the rest of his life, and became a French citizen in 1939. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.

Reviews

[ineedshr00m · Rating 2 out of 5]

i feel like what the book presents has somewhat become common knowledge nowadays, like how colors and shapes affect our mood, what red symbolizes, etc.

im sure that it was mind-blowing back in the early 1900s, but from a contemporary perspective, its insights no longer feel as impactful.

[Max Link · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting, a tough read. One main idea is how each form (like an object) has both an external function and an inner sound. Toward the end he says that children can often see a form's inner sound, unclouded by knowledge of the object's external function.