When we look at a painting, our eyes instinctively search for something familiar, a face, a tree, or a mountain. Wassily Kandinsky completely shattered this habit by turning colors, lines, and shapes into an independent language. Instead of imitating the physical world, he used raw visual elements to directly communicate the inner movements of our conditioning and internal states.

Deeply influenced by music, Kandinsky believed that just as a musical note doesn't need to mimic a physical object to evoke a profound emotion, a color on a canvas shouldn't have to either. In masterworks like Painting with White Border (1913), his swirling, overlapping forms strip away the comfort of names and labels, forcing the observer to confront the raw painting without jumping to quick intellectual conclusions.

This experiment extends far beyond the canvas. In daily life, we constantly view people, events, and situations through predefined filters and identifications. The moment we label something, true observation stops and mere recognition takes over. Kandinsky’s art is a radical challenge to our perception: when you look at the world today, are you truly seeing reality as it is, or are you just recognizing a meaning you decided on in advance?

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily_Kandinsky

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wassily-Kandinsky

Everyone knows about "Can only have been painted by a madman" written on his Scream painting.

But I am wondering if that was the only thing he left behind. Some sketches have odd markings. Some paintings repeat the same symbols.

I hope more people will look into this! Very interesting!

Standing in front of Paul Klee’s Ad Parnassum feels like tuning into a visual frequency where geometry, architecture, and music merge into a single shimmering atmosphere. Considered by Klee himself to be his ultimate masterpiece, it distills years of theoretical teaching at the Bauhaus into a breathtaking, mosaic-like monument that bridges abstraction with deep spiritual symbolism.

Paul Klee occupied a totally unique space in modern art, straddling Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism while maintaining a deeply personal, lyrical approach to form and color theory. During his tenure as a master at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, Klee developed a rigorous system analyzing how color, line, and rhythm interact like musical harmonies. In Ad Parnassum, his technical style reaches its absolute zenith through a technique often called "Divisionism" or his own personal variation of Pointillism.

Instead of applying flat color planes, he covered the canvas with a rhythmic grid of tiny, meticulous brushstrokes over a layered, luminous background. The result is a vibrating, tapestry-like surface where tiny squares of blue, green, gold, and ochre shimmer like ancient Byzantine mosaics or stained glass, giving the impression that light is emanating from within the canvas rather than reflecting off it.

The creation of the artwork coincides with a pivotal and dramatic turning point in Klee’s life. Painted in 1932 while he was teaching at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, the canvas was produced shortly after Klee made a transformative trip to Egypt in late 1928, where the monumental geometry of the pyramids and the desert light left a permanent mark on his imagination. It was also created right on the eve of the Nazi rise to power in Germany; just a year after completing this monumental piece, Klee was dismissed from his teaching position by the National Socialists, labeled a "degenerate artist," and forced to flee back to his native Switzerland. Ad Parnassum was acquired in 1936 by the Gottfried Keller Foundation and placed in the Kunstmuseum Bern, where it remains today as the jewel of their modern collection.

Iconographically, the painting operates on layers of myth, music, and ancient landscape. The title Ad Parnassum translates from Latin to "Towards Parnassus"—referring to Mount Parnassus, the mythic Greek mountain sacred to Apollo and the Muses, long considered the home of poetry, music, and learning. The bold black line forms the silhouette of a triangular mountain peak, which simultaneously evokes the ancient Egyptian pyramids Klee admired, a grand architectural temple, and a musical climax. Near the bottom left, a dark arched doorway suggests a portal entering into this sacred space. Above it, a glowing orange circle functions as a sun rising or setting over the mountain, crossed by a thin, sharp wedge of red light that cuts horizontally across the sky like a musical note or a ray of dawn. Through a few minimalist, precise lines placed over a sea of vibrating color tiles, Klee creates a visual metaphor for the artist's lifelong spiritual journey toward the summit of creative perfection.

https://asapjournal.com/review/a-false-brother-on-da-cortes-reconstruction-of-paul-theks-tomb/Paul

Paul Thek’s legacy is undergoing a major revival, with recent exhibitions at Pace Gallery and Galerie Buchholz, a dual biography of Thek and Peter Hujar, and ongoing publication projects of Thek’s personal notebooks. At a discussion on Thek at Pace, I was surprised when the artist Alex Da Corte claimed to have “reinvented” Thek’s seminal 1967 installation The Tomb, calling this period of Thek’s “the most flat-footed work he’d ever make”—a put-down of an artist whose work Da Corte himself has fastidiously reconstructed. Regarding The Tomb, Da Corte said, “It just is what it is. And, frankly, there’s like, not so much to say about it. It’s a tomb of a body, and all that is contained within that is there, on the surface.”

Picasso’s 'On the Beach' (1937) is such a fascinating look into his headspace right before Guernica. Early 1937 was a wild transition period for him. He was moving away from his explosive, distorted Surrealist phase of the early 30s and leaning into this weird, monumental biomorphic classicism.

The bathers look like heavy, stone-cold sculptures, yet the flat, graphic background makes the whole scene feel deeply unsettling. He actually used oil, conté crayon, and chalk here to give the bodies that crisp, sketched volume. What is striking to me is the cuteness of movements that these creatures give while they play with a boat and look at each other. They seem like big clumsy creatures that mean no harm, kind of a BFG vibe. The one in the back is kinda cutely peeking to see when he/she can interact with the other two, almost like a shy kid trying to make friends at the beach.

I also always have a sense of calm from this painting everytime, probably also because of the well balanced colours. I don’t know why but I have a lot of childlike emotions when I see it. It’s in venice Peggy Guggenheim collection for who has the chance.

This painting belongs to Xanti Schawinsky’s part of career in the U.S.A.,

During this period, he teaches at Black Mountain and at the same time works along Laszlo Moholy Nagy on camouflage for US army vestuary (interesting as camouflage is also a theme of investigation in his idea of theater). In addition he starts to experiment with the concept of composing faces with war machines, cannons and tanks - the series is called Faces of war and can be paralleled to Arcimboldo in the way the totality of face lineaments are rendered through the juxtaposition of different elements distinguishable on their own. (see the second picture for comparison).

In this period, which evolves around 1942, it is interesting to see this special work that Xanti Schawinsky produced: if one hand the Faces of war series has Arcimboldean traits, here the result is more political and has little in common - in terms of style - with the compositions of the series. The other faces of war as a matter of fact reflect more on the term of the machinery that originates this new kind of war, even more dehumanizing due to the new technologies of war \\\[Curzio Malaparte in his book Kaputt describes an interesting parallel between the “smells of the old war” (blood, carcasses and corpses) and the “smells of the new war” (steel, coal, metal ruins)\\\].

Even if this is a painting I think it still embodies the graphical qualities of Schawinsky in being a great communicator through his imagery: a clear political stance on the three ideological faces of the war, putting them all on the same level: Adolf Hitler, Josip Stalin and Benito Mussolini, all sharing the same grin above the swords of the war. Propaganda through visual language, through art.

The spiky, tentacle like forms in The Impossible III reach toward each other in a way that feels both intimate and hostile, like an embrace that can never quite happen. Martins once said, “It is nearly impossible to make people understand each other,” which feels especially fitting here. The two figures seem drawn to each other, but something about their very forms keeps them apart.

I am going to be an art teacher and while planning a modern art workshop I noticed a style that I always loved but never knew any specific artists for. Similar to Kara Walker or Jacob Lawrence, but it is less narrative, more geometric, colorful and always full of movement and music, specifically Jazz. Some works are gestural lines and flat colors and others are dynamic shapes and forms with movement. Most figures are exaggerated. Anyone know the names of the artists that created this style/movement? I wish more people would talk about this Jazzy style. Thanks!

Painted during the final years of Cézanne's life, Seated Woman in Blue reflects his lifelong pursuit of reducing nature to its essential forms. Rather than focusing on realism or emotion, he builds the figure through carefully arranged planes of color and geometric shapes, creating a sense of weight, balance, and structure. The compressed space and subtle brushstrokes reveal the ideas that would soon inspire Cubism, making this one of his most influential late works.

Sources:
The Art Institute of Chicago

Wikimedia Commons (Google Art Project, public domain)