A Point & Line to Plane

A Russian Expressionist painter, Wassily Kandinsky is regarded as the first to develop an entirely Abstract style. Point and Line to Plane is one of the most influential books in the 20th Century Art ( Published 1926 ).

Kandinsky presents a detailed exposition of the inner dynamics of non objective Abstract painting. His thesis is that, different constellations of point, line and surface have different emotional effects on the viewers.

Abstract art is art that does not attempt to represent anything or represent an accurate depiction of a visual reality but instead use shapes, colour forms and gestural marks to achieve its effect. They depict distorted forms flowing one into the other, loosing their boundaries and participating in undefined generalizations, delving into the primeval mucosity of substance, which is conceivably the beginning of consciousness itself.

“The creating force and the expressiveness of painting reside materially in the colour and texture of pigment, in the possibilities of form invention & organization, and in the flat plane on which these elements are brought to play.”

The artist is concerned solely with linking these absolute qualities directly to his wit, imagination and experience, without the go-between of a ‘subject’. Working on a single plane as the instantaneously visualizing factor, he realizes his mind motives and physical sensations in a permanent and universal language of colour, texture and form organization. He covers the pure plane of expression that has so long been hidden by the glazing’s of natures imitation, anecdote, and the other popular subjects. Accordingly, the artist’s work is to be measured by the vitality, the invention, and the definiteness and conviction of purpose within its own medium”

- Man Ray 1916. (The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters)