The “Blue Rider” group of artists led by Kandinsky and Franz Marc, has its first show in Munich Germany in September, 1911. This one is called Improvisation 19:
Kandinsky also wrote a treatise called Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Here are a few sample quotations from Kandinsky’s writing:
“Must we then abandon utterly all material objects and paint solely in abstractions? . . . There is no must in art, because art is free.”
“Colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hands which play, touching one key or another, purposively, to cause vibrations in the Soul.”
“Let the viewer stroll around within the picture, to force him to forget himself and so to become a part of the picture.”
“I let myself go. I thought little of the houses and trees, but applied colour stripes and spots to the canvas with the knife and made them sing out as strongly as I could.”
I think he’s trying to communicate something, but I’m not sure what. Kandinsky also wrote to Arnold Schonberg and said that he was trying to do in painting exactly what Schonberg had already accomplished in music: “The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.”