Before World War II broke out, artists criticized the materialistic society which they all lived in. In response, artists began to develop a new art form, German Expressionism. This art movement’s responsibility was to make people feel emotions again without the use of words. These artworks would resonate with the souls of the viewers and help them to realize what is most important in life. Artists wanted to "approach the problem of the spirit by way of inner knowledge." This group of artists utilized pure abstraction, miraculously combining balance and movement, a riotous range of color with each tone retaining its value, forms defying definition and lines springing as if from nowhere and ending as suddenly. Many associate spirituality with religion when in reality, it has multiple connotations especially when concerning the arts. Spirituality is essentially a feeling that is beyond the material, it speaks to the soul without subject matter with the use of color, shape, form, and media.
The Twentieth Century Introduces this new visual aesthetic during the start of the Expressionist Movement. Even with a background in Russian Culture, Kandinsky lived a majority of his life in exile in Germany. While in Munich Germany, he became one of the main figures to lead the expressionist art movement. He believed that total abstraction offered the possibility for a profound, transcendental expression because copying from nature only interfered with the artistic process. Expressionism was focused in art, literature, and drama with an emphasis on the vision of the individual artist, the childlike simplicity, a distaste for urban life, and a desire to express emotions rather than to portray external reality. Its aesthetics had deep roots in the nineteenth century. Wassily Kandinsky was a Theosophist as well as a claimed clairvoyance. Therefore, he believed that spiritual reality was hidden behind a veil of material appearances. Around 1900, many Theosophists predicted, a new age would arrive and hopefully new type of being. Wassily Kandinsky was disgusted with the way society was functioning and decided he had to do something about it. Kandinsky originally was a lawyer until he saw Claude Monet’s Haystacks and heard a performance of Wagner’s “Lohengrin.” Right then and there he knew his destiny was to become an artist. For the rest of his life, Kandinsky strove to be a pictorial artist that created works to resemble music, which he considered the greatest and most abstract of the arts. Literature, music, and art are the most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt. Through trial and error, his art created its own language which was an extreme slap in the face to the bourgeois precedents. He completely took away any kind of physical objects from his art. He believed that by doing this, the pure forms and the pure color would affect the viewer in an emotional way.
Wassily Kandinsky wanted to express the "inner necessity" to convey universal human emotions and ideas. This concept explores the relationships of forms and colors, whereas older and more traditional art represents a world that is full of recognizable images. “Spiritual” paintings reflect principles and values such as beauty, creativity, honesty, generosity, and perseverance. “Impressions,” based on real-life subjects; “improvisations,” drawn on spontaneous and unconscious images from his inner life; and “compositions,” based on multiple previous studies. The art of the typical German Expressionist shows a childlike, lyrical freedom with color and composition. Form and color are meant to touch your soul. Viewing paintings made by artist such as Wassily Kandinsky were meant to be life-changing experiences, to excite our souls so deeply and so strongly in a way which was previously only the domain of music. Colors should be used according to their emotional or even musical associations. The "vibrations" or colors, represent a world beyond that from which our "Sentient Body" receives sensations; it is our "Sentient Soul" which determines what we "experience and feel inwardly as a result of the impressions made upon us by the red, violet or yellow color." This deeper "soul-and-spiritual reality" is accessible only to the "seer," a man of vision who "directs his gaze into the Imaginative world; there was the impression, let us say, of something blue or violet, or he hears a sound or has a feeling of warmth or cold. He knows through the thinking of the heart that the impression was not a mere vision, a figment of the mind, but that the fleeting blue or violet was the expression of a soul-spiritual reality, just as the red of the rose is the expression of a material reality. Interestingly enough, Kandinsky "was inclined to talk about religious things, and is much interested in mystical books and the lives of saints. This art form expresses wordless occurrences that go on within ourselves "better than any of the existing forms of Christianity;” essentially a higher level of consciousness. He has had strange experiences of healing by faith." In 1910, he slowly began painting a series of "improvisations" in which there was no recognizable object, a wild, swirling mass of colors without apparent shape, form, or object. The removal of the object from the painting was thus intimately bound up with religious seeking. Removing reference to physical reality to express the artist's soul while simultaneously linking the viewer's soul with the cosmos. His apparently non-representational painting had religious and theosophical overtones. Two works that come to mind first are Kandinsky’s “Composition 8” and “Reciprocal Accord.” In Composition 8 (fig. 1) you can feel the accomplishment Kandinsky felt on completing this celestial work. Here geometry has become musical, playing across the canvas from lower left to upper right, from bottom to top. A black, eclipse-like circle in the upper left corner echoes the apocalyptic hints of Munich and the severity of Moscow. For Kandinsky the circle suggested the fourth dimension. Reciprocal Accord (fig. 2) was painted 1942 on his last large-format painting. He combines playfulness and gravity. This painting was displayed next to his coffin when he died in 1944 at the age 78. He achieved much in his life, considering he decided to become an artist at 30 years old. He was extremely prolific with his art and his writings. Kandinsky inspired many artists and today, continues to inspire young creatives.
When the word “spiritual” is used, the first word that comes to mind is religion; however, in the mind of Wassily Kandinsky, the word spiritual is essentially a feeling that is beyond the material, it speaks to the soul without subject matter with the use of color, shape, form, and media. Kandinsky was a fan of abstraction as much as he was a fan of symbolism. Art instantly becomes more intriguing when the artist uses symbols, it forces the viewer to think in an introspective way. Wassily Kandinsky believes that at a certain time, the creative spirit ripens and makes contact with the soul, later with other souls, and awakens a yearning, an inner urge.” This creative force is so powerful that it can create a new value in the human spirit: it leads to the evolution and the elevation of the creative spirit. The veil that shields the creative spirit is often so thick that not many humans can see through it; art, external culture, helps this internal development. Therefore, the form the creative spirit creates represents the expression of the inner content. Form reflects the spirit of the individual artist and this is recognized as style. Knowledge is reached through delicate vibrations of the human soul. The use of color and form to create an aesthetic experience to evoke an emotional experience for the viewer.
The Spiritual refers to a distinction between the religious, the occult and the transcendent, beyond any way of thinking and more of a connection. “At a certain point, the abstract spirit makes contact with the soul, later with other souls, and awakens a yearning, an inner urge.” This creative force is so powerful that it can create a new value in the human spirit. The veil that shields the creative spirit is often so thick that not many humans can see through it; art, external culture, helps this internal development. Kandinsky says that “we should never make a god out of form.” Form reflects the spirit of the individual artist and this is recognized as style. Knowledge is reached through delicate vibrations of the human soul. In Kandinsky’s eyes, art is transcendence, a creative fantasy that substituted for reality. Art made life disappear. He imagined a spiritual revolution that was beyond national boundaries. His art involved the creation of a new world as much as the destruction of an old, and that this urge toward art as a new religion was common to Europeans and Russians alike. His sensitivity to the intellectual and artistic currents which swirled around him in pre-war Munich and his ability to synthesize them into a coherent painting style and aesthetic theory. He owed a good deal to the "abstraction" and "empathy" of Worringer, the veiled reality of Bergson, the African and Oceanic primitivism of Gauguin, Picasso, and the Trocadero Museum in Paris, the "soul" of German romanticism, the color-organ of Scriabin, the "inner necessity" of Verefkina, the "cosmic painting" of Voloshina, and the emotional "vibrations" of Steiner and anthroposophy. Wassily Kandinsky wants to create a new art will give to "those observers capable of feeling them . . . emotions subtle beyond words" by establishing "vibrations" in the soul of the observer. An aesthetic elite with a "secretly implanted power of 'vision'" must drag along a "heavy weight of resisting humanity" with "cold hearts and souls asleep" to a new vision capable of striking down the enemy–atheists in religion, socialists in economics, leftists in politics, positivists in science, and realists in art. While criticizing their "excessive anticipation of definite answers," Kandinsky admires theosophy as "one of the most important spiritual movements" which seeks to "approach the problem of the spirit by way of inner knowledge." By the end of his life, he most definitely achieved this aspiration.