If you are a person who doesn’t “get” art, there is something thrilling about Wassily Kandinsky. Because trying too hard to find something concrete under all the sugary colours, random shapes and squiggles would give anyone a headache.
“Looking at a painting by Kandinsky, we are simultaneously looking at what it is concealing,” the art historian and painter John Golding once wrote. Critic David Sylvester instructed that no one should not stare too long: “As soon as we look at the picture, it starts making faces at us,” he huffed. “Some day Kandinsky will be the best known and best loved of men,” a starry-eyed Diego Rivera wrote in 1931; for now, though, he’s mostly known as opaque and impenetrable.
