Concerning the Spiritual in Art

As the various arts contribute to the spiritual revolution, they are coming together as never before in history to create a “spiritual pyramid.” Music provides the model for the other arts because it is inherently nonrepresentational and, therefore, less tied to the material world and more directly expressive of “the artist’s soul” (19) than any other art form. Visual artists, Kandinsky says, are learning from the musical sense of rhythm and abstract structure. Because visual art has no time element, it is in some respects ahead of music in the depiction of the abstract and eternal. Kandinsky foresees a bright future for the rapprochement of the arts in the search for “spiritual possibilities,” as long as the borrowing of one art from another is “not superficial but fundamental” (20).