Themes > Arts > Painting > Painting Principles and Techniques > Nonrepresentational Painting > Abstract Painting Pioneer

For years, the art history textbooks identified Kandinsky as the inventor of European abstract painting. However, recent studies of early 20th century art, such as the pivotal 1987 exhibition ``The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985'' at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, have complicated the question of abstraction's origins. Both the idea of art- for-art's-sake and the popular occultism expressed in Symbolist painting seem to have prepared the way for nonrepresentational art. But there is no denying that Kandinsky, a Russian who worked for extended periods in Germany and France, believed that he was a pioneer of abstract painting. His 1911 treatise ``Concerning the Spiritual in Art'' was the nearest thing to a first manifesto of nonrepresentational painting. In it he called for ``a form of expression which excludes the fable and yet does not restrict the free working of color in any way. The forms, movement and colors which we borrow from nature must produce no outward effect nor be associated with external objects. The more obvious is the separation from nature, the more likely is the inner meaning to be pure and unhampered.'' Kandinsky believed that painting ought to aspire to music's immediacy of speechless communication, and to this end he tried to systematize the expressive effects of colors. His experience of Wagnerian opera led him to the idea, but it was the music and friendship of Arnold Schoenberg that really freed up his thinking about how painting might be reinvented.

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