"This book contends that it was in Germany between 1906 and 1914 that artists took the fundamental steps, intellectually as well as artistically, that were to determine the course art was to take for the rest of the century. It was the Russian emigre in Munich, Wassily Kandinsky, who first argued the case for total abstraction in art and for a total right of self-expression. It led directly to non-objective painting and, together with Marcel Duchamp's important contribution in France, to the nihilism of Dada and eventually to the post-1945 New York School. The author shows that since then, artists have gone well beyond abstraction in their exploitation of that search for originality granted to them by the theoretical position taken up in Germany after 1910." "This book will be of great value to researchers and teachers looking at twentieth-century art."--Jacket.