Book1943
What Is Modern Painting?
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
MoMA's founding director makes the plain-language case that modern painting's abstraction and distortion are deliberate expressive choices continuous with the history of art, not incompetence.
Visual Arts · Art History: Modern & Contemporary
Foundations & Overviews
A topic within Art History: Modern & Contemporary, itself one of 13 topics in that field and part of Visual Arts.
Reading on Foundations & Overviews
22 works
Book1911
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Wassily Kandinsky
Argues that colour and form act on the viewer directly, as music does, so painting need not depict anything to mean something — the founding argument for abstraction.
link checked 17 Sept 2026BorrowIntermediate