The Aesthetic Theories of Wassily Kandinsky

Abstract

AT a time when so much painting is in the non-objective vein, it seems relevant to investigate the aesthetic theories of the artist who was the first champion of non-objective art, or “concrete art,”¹ as he preferred to call it. It is possible that non-objective paintings may have been painted prior to Kandinsky's first non-objective watercolor (Fig. I) of 1910 and his more ambitious Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions of 1911. There are abstractions by Arthur Dove, for example, which are dated 1910. Picabia and Kupka began working in a non-objective idiom not much later,² and Delaunay painted his non-objective Color Disks in 1912.³ In Germany Adolf Hoelzel ventured into non-objective painting as early as 1910, but whereas for Hoelzel it was merely experiment in additional possibilities, Kandinsky made non-objectivity the very foundation of his pictorial imagery.⁴