Concerning the Spiritual in Art

…Geistige in der Kunst (1912; Concerning the Spiritual in Art).

In his first treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he had emphasized in particular the supposed expressiveness of colours, comparing yellow, for example, to the aggressive, allegedly earthly sound of a trumpet and comparing blue to the allegedly heavenly sound of the pipe organ. Now, in the same spirit,…

…year he wrote much of Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which converted the aesthetic doctrines of Goethe to the purposes of the new art. The series Improvisations that followed preserved reminiscences of figuration, made illegible by the looseness of the pictorial structure; their diffuse and amorphous consistency had little connection…

In his longer essay “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” (1914), Kandinsky set out in complex intellectual terms how this new theatre, based on spirituality rather than materiality, could be constructed.