Vasili Vasileevich Kandinsky

Throughout his life, Kandinsky tried to achieve what he called 'absolute art'. Theosophy, a spiritual teaching of a higher cosmic reality above our visible world, was influential. In 1912, Kandinsky described in his book 'Uber das Geistige in der Kunst' how art could portray this higher absolute truth. It was important that the artist knew how to show his inner feeling. He should not concentrate on copying the world around him, this would only prove a distraction. In order to do this in a correct, pure way, Kandinsky developed an elaborate theory of colour and shape. Each colour and each form and all possible combinations of them expressed a unique psychological value. In 1923, for example, he described the colour yellow as: warm, slightly eccentric, taking the foreground and active. In his theory, yellow had the shape of a triangle. For him, red was the colour with the greatest intensity and belonged to the square. These combinations could be freely combined, and each deviating combination introduced new expressions.