Point and Line to Plane [antikvár]

.PREFACE BY HILLA REBAY Wassily Kandinslcy was born in Moscow, December 5, 1866. As a child, he loved to paint. The effects of colours on him were deeply felt. The beauty of the sunset over the cupolas of Moscow and the intensity of colour in peasant art, contrasting with the grey vastness of his native country, enlightened his vision. After terminating his law studies at the age of thirty, he was offered a professorship. In refusing it, at this turning point of his life, he made the decision to abandon a safe career and to leave for Munich to study painting. He later recalled this decision as "putting a final period to long studies of preceding years." After two years of painting in Munich, he was admitted to the Royal Academy where he studied under Franz von Stuck. This instruction, however, did not satisfy him and in 1902 he opened his own art school, which closed two years later when he undertook a four-year series of travels to France, Italy, Tunisia, Belgium, and Holland. Upon his return to Munich, one evening there occurred at dusk the magical incident of his seeing merely the form and tone values in one of his paintings. While not recognizing its subject, he was not only struck by its increased beauty but also by the superfluity of the object in painting, in order to feel its spell. It took him fully two years to crystallize this miraculous discovery. Nevertheless, he still used objective inspiration in the paintings of this period, but only as a structural element, while the organization of form and colour values, used for the sake of composition, already dominated these abstractions. *Thi» articis on Kandinsliy by Hillo Rebay, Director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, New York City, was originally published in Pittsburgh in the May 1946 issue of the "Carnegie Magazine" under the title of "Pioneer in Non-Objective Painting."