Life happens…and I was called in for jury duty a few weeks ago! Have been at their disposal since…and will continue to be thru April…that’s four months!! Between working at the gallery, jury duty and the many activities I am a part of, I have only been able to study Kandinsky’s book occasionally…
Trying to make sense of the book is another story…very difficult most of the time to understand what he is saying…I know the words I am reading are in my language, English, but still very difficult for me…perhaps you, my readers, can add to what I can report if you have read it as well…
I think it is interesting that Kandinsky chooses a few artists who he thinks are excellent…one being Cezanne…”he was endowed with the gift of divining the inner life in everything. His color and form are alike suitable to the spiritual harmony.”
…of Matisse he says, “He paints pictures, and in these pictures he endeavors to reproduce the divine…he is specially gifted as a colourist, but he is apt to lay too much stress on the colour…pictures which are full of great inward vitality, produced by the stress of the inner need…typical French painting, with its dainty sense of melody, raised from time to time to the summit of a great hill above the clouds.”
…of Pablo Picasso…”there is never any suspicion of this conventional beauty (as in French painting). Tossed hither and thither by the need for self-expression, Picasso hurries from one manner to another…great gulf appears between consecutive manners because Picasso leaps boldly…(leaving a) bewildered crowd of followers…from…where they saw him last…In this way there arose Cubism…He shrinks from no innovation, and if colour seems likely to balk him in his search for a pure artistic form, he throws it overboard and paints a picture in brown and white; and the problem of purely artistic form is the real problem of his life.”
“In the pursuit of the same supreme end Matisse and Picasso stand side by side, Matisse representing colour and Picasso form.”
…to be continued….
