Kandinsky studied economics and law in Moscow before moving to Germany to take up a career as an artist. From Germany, he moved to Paris and joined the ranks of the radical avant-garde there. Kandinsky is today recognized to be one of the most important of the abstract painters of the 20th century, on a par with Picasso and Matisse. In 1911, Kandinsky published a brief, but powerful treatise on the role that artists play in human development called Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

The treatise opens with a harsh critique of “the nightmare of materialism” that “holds the awakening soul still in its grip.” In Kandinsky’s opinion of his own time, “only a feeble light glimmers in a vast gulf of darkness.” Unfortunately, when the human soul encounters this flickering light of alternative possibility, it “trembles in doubt whether the light is not a dream, and the gulf of darkness reality.”

During dark times like those he describes, the only thing most people want from art is a little relief. They want art to imitate nature through the use of easily recognizable conventions. And there are many works of art that meet this need and do indeed “feed the human soul.” This art performs a critical function. “Such works of art at least preserve the soul from coarseness, they “key it up, so to speak, to a certain height, as a tuning-key the strings of a musical instrument.”

Kandinsky seems to be describing here what we have already alluded to as ‘normal art.’ The function of this type of art is to anchor our senses as closely as possible to the highest possibilities that our existing culture has to offer. Normal art maintains a baseline and holds the human soul to it so that we do not lose any of the ground we’ve already won. In doing so, it also creates a spiritual buoyancy that tends to uplift everyone up towards the higher possibilities that currently exist. Presumably, without art playing this all-important conservative function, the human spirit might spiral downward into ever more crude and self-centered elements of itself. Still, Kandinsky explains, with this function alone “the possibilities of the influence of art are not exerted to their utmost.” The true potential of art to creatively bring about a new future cannot be realized with normal art alone.

But there is another function of art, a function that we have previously labeled ‘revolutionary art,’’, that has a “powerful prophetic strength.” All of art is part of the spiritual life of humanity. And the spiritual life of humanity is a movement or development in human experience. It is a movement “upward and forward.” Art, in its revolutionary form, propels humanity’s spiritual journey; elevating and expanding the human spirit beyond its current limits. In ages of darkness, most people will turn away from artists who express higher possibilities. They cannot see what the artist is pointing toward and cannot believe in it if they do. But the revolutionary artist cannot stop. They are compelled to express what they see is possible, regardless of whether anyone else sees it. Kandinsky, in the opening words of his powerful treatise, is offering a wonderful and evocative description of what an Artist of Possibility is.

He goes on to offer a model of the development of the human spirit. He first likens our collective inner development to a triangle with its peak turned upward. In that narrowest section, there are very few people; and often, at the very tip, only one. These are the visionaries who see things that are possible, yet remain invisible to the rest of humanity. “Even those who are nearest to (the visionary soul) in sympathy do not understand (them).” The history of human spiritual progress, Kandinsky tells us, involves leaps forward that are inevitably impeded by new obstacles that prevent further growth. “But there never fails to come to the rescue, some human being, like ourselves in everything except that he has in him a secret power of vision.”

There are artistic visionaries at the topmost peak of the human triangle, but Kandinsky maintains that artists exist at every level of humanity. Throughout the entire triangle, along each horizontal line, there are artists who see beyond the limits of their current level and—in so much as their art is breaking through to the next level up—they are playing a revolutionary function. Each artist is compelled to strive upward, and many of those around them hunger for the spiritual food that their art can provide. The artist hears a voice that is inaudible to most and “almost unknowingly the artist follows the call.” That call is felt as a mysterious and “super-sensuous” stirring of the soul. During times of cultural darkness, when the higher possibilities of spirit have been reduced to only a thin and flickering light in the distance, art is the place where the new future will first reveal itself to those who have the eyes to see. “Literature, music and art are the first and most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt.”