Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Art. Nonfiction. HTML: Kandinsky sees the spiritual life of humanity as a pyramid. The artist must lead the layman to the top of this pyramid through the soulful exercise of art. Kandinsky differentiates between the superficial pleasure art inspires and the inner resonance created when art is considered attentively and allowed to touch the soul. The artist is allowed absolute freedom in order to express their soul's art, but they must not abuse this freedom if they are not expressing a personal inner resonance. Once the artwork is complete, the mystic quality they have poured into it become independent of them and filled with a spiritual breath..

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LibraryThing member bookcrazed

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" (3). Concerning the Spiritual in Art 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. (October 1996)

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LibraryThing member mykl-s

I tried to understand Kandinsky's philosophy here, but decided it was better to spend time gazing at his artworks.

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