- Kandinsky was one of the first to break free completely from the concepts of figuration. His painting Sketch for Composition V is widely considered the first abstract painting. - He was moved quite a lot by spirituality and music and also quite a lot by Monet's paintings of haystacks. - Some art historians suggest that Kandinsky's passion for Abstract art began when one day, coming back home, he found one of his own paintings hanging upside down in his studio, and he stared at it for a while before realising it was his own work, suggesting to him the potential power of abstraction. ![[Sketch for Composition V - Wassily Kandinsky.png]] ---- Kandinsky then proceeded to break free of the painterly convention of representing nature and abandoned the last vestiges of figuration. In Murnau with Church 1 (fig. 5.8) he uses bright colors, but the outlines of the church have become obscure. In 1911 he created Sketch for Composition V (fig. 5.9), a work that makes no reference to nature—until then, the central focus of art—or to any recognizable object. It is commonly considered the first abstract painting, a historic work in the canon of Western art. - [[Reductionism in Art and Brain Science]] Kandinsky argued that, like music, art need not represent objects: the sublime aspects of the human spirit and soul can only be expressed through abstraction. Just as music moves the heart of the listener, so form and color in painting should move the heart of the beholder - [[Reductionism in Art and Brain Science]]