Analytical drawing was part of Kandinsky’s preliminary course taught at the Bauhaus. As Kandinsky explained in his article “Analytical Drawing”, the teaching of drawing at the Bauhaus is an education in looking, precise observation, and the precise representation not of the external appearance of an object, but of constructive elements, the laws that govern the forces that can be discovered in given objects, and of their logical construction. (Poling, 1986)
He conceived of still life as an artistic medium with an important transitional role in the evolution of abstraction.
The analytical drawings provide the transitional link between still life and the abstract, through the medium of geometry.
Analytical drawing was a process in three stages: simplification, analysis, and transformation. Consecutive images presented the simplification, network of tensions, principal tension, and the transformation part of analytical drawing. Ullmann-Broner's exercise was used as a basis for analytical drawing research.
As we saw in Ullmann-Broner’s work, analytical drawing begins with flat outline drawings and progresses towards the linear analysis of the tensions and their relationships discovered in the structure.
One possibility of composition was an extremely flat image that fills the rectangular field, exploiting the diagonal in the initial “representation” and rendering the set of abstract relationships diagrammed in the “network” as shown in Ullmann-Broner’s work. Harmony, expressive nature of the wholeness of artwork, was achieved by filling in the network with flat areas of color.
• Abstract art is a key to understanding how art and science together might open entirely new ways of seeing and imagining. (Eric Kandel, 2016)
• Through the implementation of analytical drawing, we believe we gained a better understanding of the elaborate process of formulating a composition in abstract images and synthesizing them.