Concerning the Spiritual in Art

In his introduction to the English edition, the translator Michael T. H. Sadler introduces Wassily Kandinsky, his significance as an artist and thinker, and his main ideas in the book. In particular, he emphasizes the new socially-conscious attitude among modern artists, a contrast with the former attitude of “l’art pour l’art” (“art for art’s sake”; xiii). Kandinsky shares this attitude—intending not just to make art for its own sake but to use art to transform culture and society. Like other artists of his era, he thus finds it necessary to explain his ideas in prose in addition to putting them in practice in his paintings.

Kandinsky is a leader of a modern art movement in Munich, Germany, which has as its aim “the expression of the soul of nature and humanity” (xiii). Sadler distances himself somewhat from the philosophical style of the book, which he identifies with the “verbosity” and “vague and grandiloquent” language typical of German philosophy. His aim as a translator has been simply to translate the book accurately and not to comment on the philosophical aspects of the text.

Sadler comments on the art movements most pertinent to Kandinsky’s discussions in the book, as well as their roots in more remote movements in art history. He emphasizes that modern artists try to adopt the “freshness of vision” typical of children, and that artists like Kandinsky are trying to give painting the nonrepresentational power of music.

Finally, Sadler affirms Kandinsky’s importance in the development of abstraction in modern art, which he sees as the “almost inevitable outcome” of Post-Impressionism as represented by Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne. In this introduction, Sadler presents himself as both a translator and an art expert and acts as an “interpreter” of Kandinsky for an English-speaking audience.