Pioneer of abstract art and eminent aesthetic theorist, Vasily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow; d. 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) broke new ground in painting in the first decades of the twentieth century. His seminal pre–World War I treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), published in Munich in December 1911, lays out his program for developing an art independent of one’s observations of the external world. In this and other texts, as well as his art, Kandinsky strove to use abstraction to give painting the freedom from nature that he admired in music. His discovery of a new subject matter based solely on the artist’s “inner necessity” occupied him throughout his life. In Newsweek, Peter Plagens has put together a slideshow of artists who share Kandinsky's "aesthetic DNA." The list includes A-listers like Arshile Gorky, Willem De Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Terry Winters, Elizabeth Murray, and Thomas Nozkowski, but also includes less well-known painters Heidi Pollard, Mark Mullin, and, well, Peter Plagens himself. Of course, the list could go on and on. A shorter list might include abstract painters who don't share Kandinsky's aesthetic DNA.
