Quotes from Eric R Kandel

Kandinsky argued that, like music, art need not represent objects: the sublime aspects of the human spirit and soul can only be expressed through abstraction. Just as music moves the heart of the listener, so form and color in painting should move the heart of the beholder.

This reductionist vision is reflected in the evolution of his work. Perhaps Mondrian also implicitly realized that by excluding certain angles and focusing only on others he might pique the beholder's curiosity and imagination about the omissions.

My central premise is that although the reductionist approaches of scientists and artists are not identical in their aims—scientists use reductionism to solve a complex problem and artists use it to elicit a new perceptual and emotional response in the beholder—they are analogous. For example

In the process, he came to understand a crucial principle of brain function: our brain takes the incomplete information about the outside world that it receives from our eyes and makes it complete.

Vertical and horizontal lines represented for Mondrian the two opposing life forces: the positive and the negative, the dynamic and the static, the masculine and the feminine. This

One of the great artists of this period, Barnett Newman, wrote about his response and that of his fellow artists: "We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been devices of Western European painting." In their attempt to

Emotions—sexuality, aggression, pleasure, fear, and pain—are instinctive processes. They color our lives and help us confront the fundamental challenges of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. We

The discovery by Hubel and Wiesel of cells that respond to linear stimuli with specific axes of orientation may partly explain our response to Mondrian's work, but it does not explain the artist's focus on horizontal and vertical lines to the exclusion of oblique lines. Vertical