SOURCE: "Wassily Kandinsky in the Years of On the Spiritual in Art'," in An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Shambhala, 1988, pp. 40-50.

In the following essay, Lipsey provides an overview of the major themes of Kandinsky's seminal essay, contending that "its essential achievement was to identify the new art as a legitimate language of the spirit and to lay groundwork for a way of thinking, particularly about abstract art, that made sense. "

More deliberately than any artist of our time, Kandinsky explored the spiritual in art through his work as a painter and through writings—articulate, generous, impassioned—which circulated the idea of the spiritual more widely than his paintings ever did. It was his central idea, and he regarded it as the central idea of the art emerging all around him in 1912 when his small masterpiece, On the Spiritual in Art, was first...