Now and then a painter like an inventor does do something that is revolutionary, but these geniuses are not common, and with even them critical research invariably finds they have simply built upon the labors of others. An Edison, a Bell, a Marconi appears only when electrical science has reached a stage where the inventions rather than the men are inevitable. All this is statistically demonstrated in the records of patent offices.
We talk of this and that “period” in the work of a painter, a poet, a sculptor. Often the changes in mood and technic are marked and the transitions sharply defined. For the most part they are the turning from the imagination to observation and vice versa.
The brain is not unlike a factory; when filled to overflowing with raw material it must close its doors and work up its stock; when it has exhausted its store of impressions it must open its five senses to receive new.
According to Hegel, the great German philosopher, there are three movements of the historical pendulum; for example, we have an age of materialism followed by an age whose sole interest is in psychical phenomena; this followed by an age which extracts the truth from both of these opposite hypotheses, the golden mean. Thus, in art, we have the classical spirit for the thesis, the modern art movement, its antithesis, and we may confidently expect and hope for an age which shall select the bold, fresh spirit of the modern movement and infuse it into the proportion of classical art, which shall be the great synthesis of the artistic future. Thus the extravagant and apparently insane movement of the Futurist and Cubist will be of the greatest value in reviving art, putting red blood into art again.[8]
KANDINSKY
Village Street