ABSTRACT
Peoples tend to forget the extent to which the careers of certain modern artists have been affected by the violent vicissitudes of modern politics. W. Kandinsky lived through some of the stormiest moments in modern history. Twice in a lifetime he was obliged to uproot himself from Germany—the scene of his greatest artistic triumphs and, for all practical purposes, his permanent home. Though the exact degree of his commitment to the Bolshevik program has always remained obscure, he became a leader in the historic, short-lived alliance between the Russian avant-garde and the Revolutionary government. There is a constriction in Kandinsky's later work—and a yearning to be free of it—that has nothing to do with talent but everything to do with the artist's emotions and ideas. Kandinsky's concept of the "spiritual" was loo bloodless perhaps, too metaphysical and otherworldly, to permit him to become the kind of pictorial poet he saw triumphantly at work in Miro.
