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tightly bound to nature's exterior, we find our forms there. The entire
question is how may we accomplish this? How far does our liberty
permit us to alter these forms, and what colors may we combine? This
may go as far as the feeling of the artist goes." The path, in 1912, lay
for Kandinsky between the equally dread possibilities in naturalism
(which for him, under the urgency of a "strife towards the beyond," a
Faustian will, is only fantasy) and the vacuum of an "entirely abstracted
use of color in geometrical form ." Even the disintegrations of the cubists
were too "objective"; Picasso, he complained, threw himself from one
exterior means to another in his constructional dispersions.
The resolution of the problem for Kandinsky came in what he calls
his counterpoint, a constlluction from inner necessities and vibrations
in which colors and forms stand in purely internal (and isolated?)
relationship independent of objective reality. This is freedom. By a
highly theoretical grammar of form and color- warm against cold, yellow
against blue, the activity of red against the immobility of green (the
bourgeoisie) -Kandinsky anticipates and presses to its limits a dialectic
opened some years later by Ozenfant and the Purist abstractionists to
determine what feelings and ideas are associated with certain forms and
colors. Thus was established for Kandinsky that spiritual counterpoint
of color against color, form against form, by which we are released into
THE MEETING
of East and West
By F. S. C. NORTHROP
Here is a brilliant analysis of the philosophical, economic, political,
and religious beliefs of America, Europe, and Asia,
in
which the
author arrives at a basis for world culture and understanding.
Ordway. Tead, writing in the
Saturday Review of Literature,
calls
this book "one of the most provocative, penetrating, and thrilling
deployments of philosophical insight that has come to light in a
generation." Howard Mumford Jones, in the
New York Times,
says that "its scope is almost as vast as Spengler's, and it is more
applicable to the crisis of our time."
$6.00 at your book store
MACMILLAN
