SOURCE: "The Kandinsky Paradox," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, Spring, 1973, pp. 177-87.

In the following essay, Millard maintains that although Kandinsky was a great theoretician, he was not a great painter.

Because Kandinsky occupies a particularly prominent place in the development of twentieth-century painting there has been an unspoken tendency to assume that his is an art of the first quality. If not ranked with the work of masters such as Matisse, it is tacitly presumed to occupy a place among the output of the major painters not much below the top level. It is, therefore, something of a shock to review a sizable and representative selection of his work and to realize that if Kandinsky was perhaps the most powerful and daring intellect among the artists of the last seventy-five years he was far from being possessed of a strong pictorial sensibility. Put more simply...