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Book

Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911)

Kandinsky's manifesto: colors are sounds for the soul, and painting can be as abstract as music.

Published
Munich (Piper), 1911
English
Trans. Michael Sadleir, 1914
Key idea
Inner necessity

Über das Geistige in der Kunst, published in Munich in 1911 and in English as Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1914, is Wassily Kandinsky's case for abstract painting. Its central idea is 'inner necessity': an artist should choose colors and forms for their effect on the soul, not to copy objects.

Color, he argues, works in two steps: a physical effect on the eye, then a 'psychic' effect that sets the soul vibrating. Yellow is the typically earthly color, insistent and aggressive; blue the heavenly one, drawing us inward. Green is the most restful color, calm to the point of tedium. White is a silence full of possibilities; black the silence of death. Sharp colors suit sharp forms, like a yellow triangle, and deep colors round ones, like a blue circle.

He also maps colors onto instruments: light blue a flute, darker blue a cello, darker still a double bass, the deepest blue an organ; keen lemon yellow a shrill trumpet; green the calm middle notes of a violin. These are personal analogies, close in spirit to synesthesia and to Rimbaud's vowels, and they owe a debt to Goethe's lively and restless sides of color.

None of it is experimental science (see color psychology), but it changed art. The book came out as Kandinsky moved into fully abstract painting, with works like Composition VII (1913), and it became a reference for the Bauhaus, where he taught from 1922.

Swatches

Colors

Sources

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