Point and Line to Plane by Wassily Kandinsky

This book was hard to read. I think the translation was done poorly. Initially, it was written in German by a non-native speaker, and then someone translated it into English. Sometimes, sentences do not make sense at all.

But there are some good ideas that I haven’t heard before. One is that images are about space, and music is about time. I tried hard to remember a piece of music or a picture that would break out of those constraints and failed. Second is the idea that the canvas has built-in tension depending on its form. I can say that those two times I was looking at an empty canvas, it felt different if they were in landscape or a portrait position. Also, the square canvas is dead because there is no tension, which makes sense and should be used to amplify the artist’s idea.

He talks a lot about the temperature or sound of a line/dot/plane, which I was not able to follow. It felt like he was trying to find the proper names/words for stuff he explained, but he ultimately lost me. Again, that may be a result of a poor translation.

Original Title: Wassily Kandinsky: Point and Line to Plane: Bauhausbücher 9

ISBN: 3037786620 (ISBN13: 9783037786628)

GoodReads: 3.20 / 5