a calm, warm tonality. The artist intuits the inner effect of the canvas format and dimensions, which he chooses according to the tonality he wants to give to his work. Kandinsky considered the basic plane a living being, which the artist "fertilises" and feels "breathing". Each part of the basic plane possesses an affective colouration; this influences the tonality of the pictorial elements which will be drawn on it, and contributes to the richness of the composition resulting from their juxtaposition on the canvas. The above of the basic plane corresponds with looseness and to lightness, while the below evokes condensation and heaviness. The painter's job is to listen and know these effects to produce paintings which are not just the effect of a random process, but the fruit of authentic work and the result of an effort towards inner beauty. This book contains many photographic examples and drawing from Kandinsky's works which offer the demonstration of its theoretical observations, and which allow the reader to reproduce in him the inner obviousness provided that he takes the time to look at those pictures with care, that he let them acting on its own sensibility and that he let vibrating the sensible and spiritual strings of his soul. Personal life After graduating in 1892, Kandinsky married his cousin, Anja Chimiakin, and became a lecturer on Jurisprudence at the University of Moscow. In the summer of 1902, Kandinsky invited Gabriele Münter to join him at his summer painting classes just south of Munich in the Alps. She accepted, and their relationship became more personal than professional. In 1911, the German expressionist painter was one of several artists joining Kandinsky in his Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) group, which ended with the onset of World War I. Kandinsky and Münter became engaged in the summer of 1903, while he was still married to Anja, and travelled extensively through Europe, Russia and North Africa until 1908. He separated from Anja in 1911. From 1906 to 1908 Kandinsky travelled across Europe until he settled in the small Bavarian town of Murnau. He returned to Moscow in 1914 when the first World War broke out. In 1916, he met Nina Nikolaevna Andreevskaya (1899–1980), whom he married on 11 February 1917, when she was 17 or 18 and he was 50 years old. At the end of 1917 they had a son, Wsevolod, or Lodya as he