The Art of Spiritual Harmony by Wassily Kandinsky, translated by MTH Sadler, 112 pages
One of the foremost artists of the twentieth century, Wassily Kandinsky played a major role in the development of abstract painting in both his native Russia and in Germany, where he spent his most productive years and founded the Blaue Reiter school. This short work contains Kandinsky's exposition of his thoughts on art in general and his method in particular.
Disdaining the merely material, Kandinsky embraces a Romantic spiritual heroism akin to that of Stephen Dedalus. He seeks for painting the freedom from nature that the Romantics associated with music, the freedom to bring forth the vision of a semi-divine, Tolstoian inner self. Unfortunately, this inner self opens upon the abyss. Kandinsky's ideas are to art what Madame Blavatsky was to religion, his "pyramid to heaven" ultimately a tower of Babel.
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