Odd bloke that Kandinsky
I read On The Spiritual in Art , by Kandinsky interested to see what he meant. He was the first famous abstract painter and I do like his paintings. The book is as odd as he is. He says (and I agree with him, 100 years later) that: " The observer these days is incapable of emotion when looking at a work of art. The observer looks for objective reality or interpretation. Thus the observer misses the whole point. " Elsewhere in the book though he goes into mechanical detail of how to construct colors and images to have this emotional effect. Here is a small selection: Black mixed with any other color evokes tragedy . (Does it? Really?) Green contains yellow and blue as paralyzed forces which can be reactivated. (Here he shows he does not understand light mixing.) Blue evokes the infinite. (That seems true if you only think of skies. But why not black as well? A dark night sky full of stars for example) Yellow never contains a profound meaning. (A bit of an arbitrary stat