Christopher Riopelle

Coming from Russia, I suppose you might even say the most spiritual of nations, Kandinsky was always interested in something more than mere representation. He wanted it to encompass spiritual values. Looking at Delacroix when he got to Paris he was seeing an artist, in particularly in some of his late religious works, who was moving beyond mere representation into something that in its boldness of paint handling etc., rose to a spiritual level.

Kandinsky grabbed onto that movement from representation pushing it further so that you could see spiritual elements entering into the art. That is very much what pushed him in the direction of an abstraction that Delacroix himself would never have understood, Delacroix always thought of himself as a representational artist, but if as it were you pushed what Delacroix had done to its extreme of freedom, you would arrive at abstraction and that’s, I think, the adventure of what you are seeing in the Kandinsky is that process going on.

Eric Bruce

Press the green button to hear about the hidden forms in Kandinsky’s painting.