Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Wassily Kandinsky was born in 1866 in Moscow and grew up mostly in Odesa, Ukraine. Gifted in music and painting as a child, Kandinsky did not settle on art as his career until the age of 30, after having pursued studies in law and economics. A viewing of Monet’s Impressionist painting Haystacks led him to decide to become an artist. Upon being offered a law professorship in Estonia, Kandinsky declined and instead traveled to Munich, Germany to study and pursue painting.

Strongly influenced by Russian folk art as well as by the Post-Impressionists and Fauvists, Kandinsky began creating paintings in which color was the main element and where recognizable objects were painted in an abstract way. These included The Blue Rider, which gave its name to a group Kandinsky formed with likeminded artists including Franz Marc, August Macke, and Gabriele Münter, who was Kandinsky’s partner at the time. Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910) was Kandinsky’s major writing of this period and reflects the importance of art theory to his career and legacy.

The outbreak of World War I forced Kandinsky back into Russia, where he assisted in art education reform for the newly formed Soviet government. However, the Soviet authorities soon banned abstract art as contrary to socialist ideals, and Kandinsky returned to Germany, where he taught at the Bauhaus, an influential school of art, architecture, and design. When the Nazis closed the school in the early 1930s, Kandinsky moved to Paris, where he would live for the rest of his life. His last works have been described as a synthesis of his previous work—abstract compositions in which only oblique suggestions of objects from the external world are present. Kandinsky died in Paris in 1944.

Kandinsky had a profound influence on 20th-century art through both his paintings and his writings, which include elements of mysticism and Theosophy in seeking to describe the spiritual content of art. Living through the eventful decades of the turn of the century, the Russian Revolution, and the two World Wars, Kandinsky believed that the world was on the cusp of a crisis that would lead to a new spiritual consciousness—a conviction he sought to express both in his paintings and in writings like Concerning the Spiritual in Art.