SOURCE: "The Lucid Order of Wassily Kandinsky," in Art and Alienation: The Role of the Artist in Society, Horizon Press, 1967, pp. 138-50.

In the following essay, Read traces the development of Kandinsky's painting and philosophy of art.

As a painter Kandinsky's achievement was coherent in development, original in style, and accumulative in force; but the painting was the direct expression of a slowly matured philosophy of art. It is possible that this philosophy of art has as much significance for the future as the paintings that were its outcome, but in this essay I shall try to show how the philosophy and the painting evolved, step by step in dialectical correspondence.

Wassily Kandinsky was born on 4 December 1866, in the city of Moscow. His father belonged to a family that had for many years lived as exiles in East Siberia, near the Mongolian frontier. There seems to have been...