Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Excerpt: ...stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music. (The Merchant of Venice, Act v, Scene I.) Musical sound acts directly on the soul and finds an echo there because, though to varying extents, music is innate in man. Footnote: Cf. E. Jacques-Dalcroze in The Eurhythmics of Jacques-Dalcroze. London, Constable.-M.T.H.S. Everyone knows that yellow, orange, and red suggest ideas of joy and plenty (Delacroix). Footnote: Cf. Paul Signac, D'Eugene Delacroix au Neo-Impressionisme. Paris. Floury. Also compare an interesting article by K. Schettler: Notizen uber die Farbe. (Decorative Kunst, 1901, February). These two quotations show the deep relationship between the arts, and especially between music and painting. Goethe said that painting must count this relationship her main foundation, and by this prophetic remark he seems to foretell the position in which painting is today. She stands, in fact, at the first stage of the road by which she will, according to her own possibilities, make art an abstraction of thought and arrive finally at purely artistic composition. Footnote: By Komposition Kandinsky here means, of course, an artistic creation. He is not referring to the arrangement of the objects in a picture.-M.T.H.S. Painting has two weapons at her disposal: 1. Colour. 2. Form. Form can stand alone as representing an object (either real or otherwise) or as a purely abstract limit to a space or a surface. Colour cannot stand alone; it cannot dispense with boundaries of some kind. Footnote: Cf. A. Wallace Rimington. Colour music (OP. CIT.) where experiments are recounted with a colour organ, which gives symphonies of rapidly changing colour without boundaries-except the unavoidable ones of the white curtain on which the colours are reflected.-M.T.H.S. A never-ending extent of red can only be seen in the mind; when the word red is heard, the colour...