Product Description: In this famous work by a pioneer in the movement to free art from the bonds of tradition—a work long considered essential to understanding the evolution of 20th-century art—Kandinsky explores the role of the line, point and other key elements of non-objective painting. 127 illustrations.
Prepare to marvel Be prepared to marvel. You will need a lot of concentration, and a lot of silence to process these teachings. It's not hard, but this is deep stuff. This book is prophetic. You almost have to prepare yourself spiritually in order to really grasp this material. Are you willing to invest the time? I suggest you ask yourself this question before you order this book. If you are, then let me tell you it is worth every word, or should I say "point" on the page.
PS: This is not a book for someone needing basic information. This is only for the serious art student or seriously interested lay-person. Also, those who enjoy logic and math might like this book.
About abstraction, or is it abstraction? Kandinsky's goal seems admirable, to create a vocabulary in which abstract visual art can be discussed. That would allow a theory of abstraction to develop, with the promise that art would advance as its theory advanced. He argues his case well, he was trained as a lawyer after all, using analogy to that most abstract of arts: music.
He presents his thoughts in three sections following logical progression: point, line, and plane. As one would expect in discussing visual impression, Kandinsky acknowledges the mathematical point but generalizes it to isolated, self-contained marks of many kinds. Already, in the zero-dimensional world, Kandinsky begins his conceptual whirl: a point is not just a point, but a tension, a temporal presence, and even a sound - though I'm not convinced that this "sound" relates to audible impressons. The point even manifests as a period in punctuation. Its presence and position changes or erases a sentence's meaning; presumably, one is to infer that it has similar meaning in visual compostion.
Moving on to Line, Kandinsky crams a huge number of concepts onto the page: temperature, hue plus white and black, movement and force, angle, sound and triple sound, and even the duality of male/active vs. female/passive. Certainly there is much to discuss in all of these things, but the color, sound, and sex of a specific diagonal angle elude me. They are clear enough to Kandinsky, though, who announces these relations with absolute certainty and inevitability. His writing makes me think of mysteries revealed with papal infallibility, and with internal reason beyond human reasoning. Discussion of Plane drives even deeper into thickets of interlaced concept. I admit that I was never able to hack a clear path for myself through his conceptual undergrowth.
In the end, Kandinsky's vision remains a statement of his own inner experience - not of thinking that could be shared and pushed forward by other minds. Instead of showing the world how to think, he shows the world how he thinks. Although I'm no great fan of his art, that glimpse fascinates me, and is reason enough for reading and experiencing this remarkable text.
-- wiredweird
this book shows how you can assign meaning to many aspects of art I think this book is useful for understanding Kandinsky's art but I think it is most useful for artists trying to form their own ideas about art. The reason for this is that in ascribing characteristics to many aspects of art for example lines curves and planes, the author makes us as artists think about how we use these aspects of art in our work. So, in other words, he gets you thinking about the meaning of all those marks on paper we make. I think most artists will find their own explanations of the various types of line, curve, color and plane, what this book does is give you the idea for doing so in the first place.
EXCELLENT SERVICE. This item was received in a very timely , and in excellent condition.
indispensable Este libro se ha convertido en el indispensable para los estudiantes de artes plásticas, nos define el punto, la linea y el plano desde muchos puntos de vista además de explicar la generación y desarrollo de los tres elementos básicos del arte visual.
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