Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Yellow, Red, Blue’ (1925)

by Maria Popova

“To harmonize the whole is the task of art.”

“Art is a form of nourishment (of consciousness, the spirit),” 31-year-old Susan Sontag wrote in her diary in 1964. “Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness,” wrote Alain de Botton half a century later in the excellent Art as Therapy. But perhaps the greatest meditation on how art serves the soul came more than a century earlier, in 1910, when legendary Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinskypublished Concerning the Spiritual in Art (free download; public library) — an exploration of the deepest and most authentic motives for making art, the “internal necessity” that impels artists to create as a spiritual impulse and audiences to admire art as a spiritual hunger. Continue reading Kandinsky on the Spiritual Element in Art and the Three Responsibilities of Artists →