Concerning the Spiritual in Art

When he wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky was living in Munich, Germany, then the scene of one of Europe’s major modern art movements. This movement started in 1892, when a group of artists left Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts—the city’s major arts institution—over what they considered its restrictive and overly conservative rules. Known as the Munich Secession, this event led to the development of an active modern-art scene centered around the Munich neighborhood of Schwabing.

Kandinsky moved to Munich in 1896 to begin his art career. There, he eventually formed the Blue Rider (Blaue Reiter) group of artists, which championed such modern styles as expressionism, post-Impressionism, and eventually abstraction. Named after Kandinsky’s painting The Blue Rider, the group (which included Franz Marc, August Macke, and Kandinsky’s girlfriend, Gabriele Münter, in addition to Kandinsky himself) published a magazine of the same name in which they espoused their artistic philosophy. Between 1911 and 1914, the group presented a series of exhibitions that they shared their work with the public for the first time, to a mixed critical response. Concerning the Spiritual in Art grew directly out of Kandinsky’s involvement with the Blue Riders and can be seen as a manifesto of their aesthetic beliefs about the relationship between abstraction and