The picture as a living space

As early as 1910, numerous painters conceived their works as environments. In their writings, they explained how their abstract images were intended to have a healing and revitalizing effect on viewers, using climate, sun, air, and natural rhythms as comparisons. Linn Burchert formulates the model of living space as a fundamental artistic perspective shared by such diverse artists as Wassily Kandinsky, Yves Klein, Max Burchartz, and others. It becomes evident that ecological ideas had already entered the art world before the 1960s and highlights the various sources from the history of science and ideas that artists drew upon to justify their concepts.