Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: I love the way Kandinsky writes. It is so captivating. He is a very spiritual artist. He motivates and inpires me. I've learned to develope an appreciation for various art, even the art for which I would not be interested in creating myself. He has helped me to see beauty in everything.

Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: I love the way Kandinsky writes. It is so captivating. He is a very spiritual artist. He motivates and inpires me. I've learned to develope an appreciation for various art, even the art for which I would not be interested in creating myself. He has helped me to see beauty in everything.

Rating:
Summary: A Spiritual Classic
Review: If you consider yourself religious, and you also love art, this is a book you need to read. Kandinsky was one of our past masters of art. His works were beautiful essays on music, love, and other spiritual issues. It is not often artists are able to express their feelings verbally, but Kandinsky does an excellent job in this classic. Highly recommended for any library.

Rating:
Summary: a classic about color and form as spiritual symbols
Review: Kandinsky spent a lifetime painting in search of the spiritual. His body of work was his philosophical opus, provoked initially by the prodigious philosophical works of Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, in which she introduced the Western world--and Kandinsky--to Eastern philosophies. Kandinsky believed that art had a duty to be spiritual in nature, an expression of "inner need," as he came to call it. He called "art for art's sake" a "vain squandering of artistic power." This book was both his call to artists to meet their obligation to humanity and his attempt to define and explain color and form in its relation to expressing the message of the soul.

Rating:
Summary: A Spiritual Classic
Review: The 1910s was surely the most exciting, radical, innovative and genuinely NEW period in the history of all the arts, writing, music, painting, cinema, dance. it was also one of the few periods when creative frenzy was escorted by critical might, and is almost as famous for its artistic collectives, its '-isms', its iconoclasms and its spectacularly aggressive, wipe-the-slate-clean manifestoes as it is for any one artwork produced.

Today, however, there aren't many of these manifstoes that possess more than quaint historical value. Kandinsky's 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art' is one, and probably to our own shame, speaks as loudly to us today as it did to the artist's contemporaries. A cry against all that is bogus or a dead-end in art - the bourgeois-currying; the trend-following; the excessively materialistic, naturalistic or representational; art in which formal invention is not matched by emotional power - the book demands a return to spirituality in art in an age where a godless faith in science has resulted in a soulless culture.

Kandinsky is the artist who said that 'Art was close to religion', and his concept of painting is heavly bound up with his Russian orthodox upbringing (as well as later exposure to theosophy). One does not have to be a card-carrying mystic, however, to recognise the truth of his central argument, that the only art with the power to truly move us is that which is ruthlessly faithful to the artist's inner need, not public taste or contemporary styles.

this belief led Kandinsky towards abstraction: he rejected the idea that a painter should draw what was on the surface, instead of its inherent spirit or harmony (if this led to a cul-de-sac in 20th century art, this is because Kandinsky's mimics lacked his moral drive). This book is fascinating as Kandinsky, still creating recognisably (though distorted) representational works, was struggling towards the abstract geomotry for which he is now famous. It is essential for any lover of Kandinsky's work, and modern art in general, with its revealing analyses of colour and form, their 'psychology', and the various effects they can achieve. it is a portrait of modernism from the inside, and it is goosebumping reading a gifted contemporary passing judgement on Picasso and Matisse, although time has parted company with him in his preference for Maeterlinck and Isadora Duncan.

In his demand for a total art that would unite theatre, music and painting, he looks forward to the great Ballets Russes happenings, most significantly Nijinsky/Stravinsky/Picasso's 'The Rite of spring'. Throughout, he calls for painting to achieve the non-naturalistic liberation of music.

But behind the passion and certainty is an intellectually playful (not always caught by the fusty translation), though deadly earnest artist, who knows that everything he says is provisional and a guide, a record of his own groping, striving, tireless searching.

Rating:
Summary: Invaluable historical document; challenge to the future.
Review: The 1910s was surely the most exciting, radical, innovative and genuinely NEW period in the history of all the arts, writing, music, painting, cinema, dance. it was also one of the few periods when creative frenzy was escorted by critical might, and is almost as famous for its artistic collectives, its '-isms', its iconoclasms and its spectacularly aggressive, wipe-the-slate-clean manifestoes as it is for any one artwork produced.

Today, however, there aren't many of these manifstoes that possess more than quaint historical value. Kandinsky's 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art' is one, and probably to our own shame, speaks as loudly to us today as it did to the artist's contemporaries. A cry against all that is bogus or a dead-end in art - the bourgeois-currying; the trend-following; the excessively materialistic, naturalistic or representational; art in which formal invention is not matched by emotional power - the book demands a return to spirituality in art in an age where a godless faith in science has resulted in a soulless culture.

Kandinsky is the artist who said that 'Art was close to religion', and his concept of painting is heavly bound up with his Russian orthodox upbringing (as well as later exposure to theosophy). One does not have to be a card-carrying mystic, however, to recognise the truth of his central argument, that the only art with the power to truly move us is that which is ruthlessly faithful to the artist's inner need, not public taste or contemporary styles.

this belief led Kandinsky towards abstraction: he rejected the idea that a painter should draw what was on the surface, instead of its inherent spirit or harmony (if this led to a cul-de-sac in 20th century art, this is because Kandinsky's mimics lacked his moral drive). This book is fascinating as Kandinsky, still creating recognisably (though distorted) representational works, was struggling towards the abstract geomotry for which he is now famous. It is essential for any lover of Kandinsky's work, and modern art in general, with its revealing analyses of colour and form, their 'psychology', and the various effects they can achieve. it is a portrait of modernism from the inside, and it is goosebumping reading a gifted contemporary passing judgement on Picasso and Matisse, although time has parted company with him in his preference for Maeterlinck and Isadora Duncan.

In his demand for a total art that would unite theatre, music and painting, he looks forward to the great Ballets Russes happenings, most significantly Nijinsky/Stravinsky/Picasso's 'The Rite of spring'. Throughout, he calls for painting to achieve the non-naturalistic liberation of music.

But behind the passion and certainty is an intellectually playful (not always caught by the fusty translation), though deadly earnest artist, who knows that everything he says is provisional and a guide, a record of his own groping, striving, tireless searching.

Rating:
Summary: Marvelous introduction to Kandinsky
Review: Written in 1911, Kandinsky provides a treatise on the meaning of modern art. It is a very subjective and very compelling view of the direction art should take, avoiding the superficial pitfalls that were all so common. He provides a pithy review of Impressionist art and its role in the modern art movement. He notes the successes and shortcomings of Picasso and Matisse as they pushed the envelope of art but weren't quite sure where they wanted to take it.

There is a long chapter on the meaning and importance of color, eschewing the analytical approach. He takes a more subjective approach, noting how color and music can be viewed in similar terms. He talks about the attempt in classical music to create chromatic scales, but Kandinsky prefers to deal with such connections more abstractly, treating color as he would the sounds of instruments, for instance comparing yellow to the blare of the trumpet.

There is a short biography of Kandinsky which serves as an introduction and a preface by the translator, placing Kandinsky in the pantheon of modern artists. The book is by no means exhaustive. Kandinsky's writings have been collected into a marvelous book edited by Peter Vergo, which offers the width and breadth of this artist's vision. But, if you are looking for the short course, this is the place to go.