Kandinsky

This quite influential book as well as other essays "constituted practically a programmatic manifesto for the expressionist generation" (Selz 309). The book has been described as "a treatise on the mystique of artistic creativity, a messianic creed, that's complemented with an essay on colour harmonies" (Volboudt 39). Kandinsky's ideas about art have been tied to his ideas about spirituality as well as the future with the human race. As Kramer notes, "however odd or alien individuals ideas may seem to us today" the paintings needs to be viewed historically, if not aesthetically, during the context on the painter's idea and the setting exactly where it was formed (3).

The very first decades of the twentieth century were a time of revolutions in politics as well as the arts. The Russian Symbolist movement in the 1890s was interested in new mystical ideas and had already gotten Kandinsky interested in searching "beyond the boundaries of naturalism and materialism for ones foundations of his art" (Kramer 4). The rationalism on the nineteenth century was, in the view of quite a few artists and thinkers, becoming replaced by a brand new freedom marked by spirituality as well as the expression of individual feeling. Even within the sciences, "the importance in the intuitive as against the purely experimental" was being stressed as scientists like Werner Heisenberg questioned "the inherent limitations of quantitative observation" (Selz 311).

Kandinsky was also incredibly interested within the Symbolist idea of synaesthesia exactly where the many senses could transfer among sensations as, for example, color that might be 'heard.' His interest in color was of very good importance and he believed, like quite a few Romantic artists ahead of him, that "color could directly influence the human soul" (Selz 318). In his system, for example, blue was a "heavenly" color and, in paintings, it retreated within the viewer, beckoning to "the infinite" and "arousing a longing for purity" (Selz 318). Yellow was an earth color without having particular meaning, white symbolized beginnings in a world that were voided of all material substance, and black was "an eternal silence" and "termination" (Selz 318).

In this stimulating atmosphere Kandinsky formulated ideas that had been in accordance with modern day thinking about art and on a specific mystical belief method to which he was attracted. His straightforward idea was that "a humanity perverted by material progress could discover redemption via art" (Volboudt 39). Kandinsky saw the art consisting of form with no natural reference, pure abstraction, as the art that would accomplish this redemption. His project was to generate such works while, in his writing, he "laboured to turn a speculation on the meaning of pure form into a program of language" (Hughes 299). The materialist tendency in art and in society would be corrected by the rise in a new spirit in between human beings. These ideas derived in the Theosophy of Helena Blavatsky and Rudolph Steiner. This was a mystical belief technique in which the physical world was rejected as unimportant and people's materialism, their "attachment to objects of earthly longing", could only allow them to "drift in endless dissatisfaction" (Hughes 299). The Millennium (the year 2000) was approaching and in a new "Epoch of Very good Spirituality".

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