EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

What Art is Not

Wassily Kandinsky, said to be the first artist to paint complete abstraction, is an interesting milestone on our way to understanding art. After all, from the development of truly figurative and illusionistic art in the Renaissance up to the arrival of Kandinsky five centuries later, observers have thought that art depicted the exterior world of nature; from Kandinsky onwards complete abstraction is said to depict the inner nature of the artist. Art history since the Renaissance is essentially split between those two guiding principles.

Thus an artist steeped in the occult becomes a fulcrum on which the history of art is unsteadily balanced.¹ What did he think about the art that came before him? This is what he said: "The greatest mistake one can make is to believe that Art is the reproduction of Nature."² The very artist said to turn art from nature inwards rubbishes the idea to begin with. Art is not the reproduction of Nature, Kandinsky tells us. Never was. Never is. Never will be.

1. For Kandinsky's Russian mysticism, see Arthur I. Miller, Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) 1996, p. 424

2. Cited in Ulrike Becks-Malorny, Kandinsky (Taschen) 2002, p. 14