THE OVERSTRAND PROJECT

The painting "Complex-Simple " came into being in 1939, from the brush of the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, just prior to World War ll. Kandinsky is known for having taken up one of the intellectual preoccupations of his time, namely the idea that there is a secret correspondence among the arts, particularly between the otherwise disparate arts of music and painting, colours and sounds. He grappled with what he called the "inner necessity " of the urge to create and how to illustrate the idea that artistic activity resonates across the boundaries of colour and sounds. By 1939 his skill as an artist was fully realised, but it is his formative years that are of interest to a jurist. In the biographical section of his book on Kandinsky, Benedikt Taschen writes that in 1886 Kandinsky decided to study law and economics. He then comments: Perhaps he chose these dry, academic fields of study to counterbalance his inner, unresolved tensions, or perhaps to flee from the troubling, unassimilated visions of his inner world.3 He goes on to add: In his free time he continued to occupy himself with painting and nature's 'chorus of colours', which still confronted him with insoluble problems. Jurisprudence, which trained his sense for abstract relationships, was far easier.