SECOND MOMENT [PART 2]

K ANDINSKY’S
AND RELATED ESSAYS

ALTHOUGH IT REMAINS IN MANY WAYS his most important statement on the sub-
ject, Über das Geistige is far from the only text in which Kandinsky indicated his
generally Hegelian-dialectical views on art.1 In his “Rückblicke” (Reminiscences)
of 1913, we nd a concise summary of several Hegelian themes:

e progress of truth is extremely complex: the untrue becomes true, the true untrue.
. . . Art in many respects resembles religion. Its development consists not of new dis-
coveries that obliterate old truths and stamp them as false (as is apparently the case in
science). Its development consists in moments of sudden illumination . . . that are in
essence nothing other than organic development, the continuing organic growth of
earlier wisdom. . . . e new branch does not render the tree trunk super uous: the
trunk determines the possibility of the branch.2

Still more succinct is a phrasing that took its initial form in an essay Kandinsky
wrote for the catalogue of a 1922 exhibition of his work in Stockholm, and then
used repeatedly thereafter: “ e worn-out words of yesterday, ‘either-or,’ will be
replaced by the one word of tomorrow, ‘and.’”3 In fact, two of the essays in which
Kandinsky employed this aphorism bear titles—“And, Some Remarks on Synthetic
Art” (1927) and “Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow” (1925)—that read as their own, even
pithier encapsulations of the shape and movement of the Hegelian dialectic.4
Kandinsky’s second book, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane),
published in 1926 as the ninth volume in Gropius and Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus
series, also contains a number of suggestive parallels with works in Hegel’s corpus.5
In the forward to the book, Kandinsky asserted that the ideas developed in it were
an “organic continuation” of those laid out in Über das Geistige.6 He didn’t add,
perhaps regarding it as self-evident, that such organic continuity in no way pre-
cluded (and, in a Hegelian universe, actually necessitated) signi cant, dialectical
change. e di erences between the two texts are in fact striking. True to its title,
Über das Geistige had concerned itself with art’s intellectual or spiritual dimension.
Punkt und Linie, by contrast, says precious little about spirit. e text is o ered
34 PART I — PAINTING IN THEORY

instead as “a precise, purely scienti c examination of pictorial means” at once

“theoretical” and “analytic.”7 We are even warned near the beginning of Punkt und
Linie that its account “will proceed with painful, pedantic precision,” for only “by
a process of microscopic analysis will the science of art lead to an all-embracing
synthesis.”8 Über das Geistige had argued almost exactly the opposite: “ eory is
never in advance of practice in art, never drags practice in its train, but vice versa.
Everything depends on feeling, especially at rst. What is right artistically can
only be attained through feeling, particularly at the outset.”9 Plainly the intuitive
method, guided by “feeling,” that had directed Kandinsky’s artistic explorations
“at the outset” had given way by 1926 to antithetical practices. More than simply
re ecting a change of heart, the new approach was necessitated, Punkt und Linie
suggests, by wholly new circumstances—above all that the nonrepresentational
painting that remained only in potentia when Über das Geistige was written had
become in the years following a well-established reality.10
Kandinsky’s Bauhaus book also di ers signi cantly from its predecessor in
regard to the particular formal elements on which it focuses. Where Über das
Geistige had attended to color—as if in a rmation of Hegel’s dictum that “color
is the element of painting”—Punkt und Linie concentrates instead on linear and
geometric form.11 Ever since he began writing about art, Kandinsky, like Hegel
before him, had drawn a distinction between “form” and “content,” even as he
insisted on their adequation. In great works of art, spirit found its proper form,
and form was, by de nition, whatever gave shape to that (otherwise insensible)
spiritual content. As he wrote in his 1913 essay “Painting as Pure Art” (“Malerei
als reine Kunst”): “For the content, which exists rst of all only ‘in abstracto’ to
become a work of art, the second element—the external—must serve as its em-
bodiment. us content seeks a means of expression, a ‘material’ form.”12
Following his arrival at the Bauhaus, however, Kandinsky introduced a dis-
tinction within that earlier conception of “form.” If in its larger or more general
sense it was still to be understood in opposition to “content,” there was also, he
said, a narrower de nition of the term that explicitly excluded color.13 “Form” in
this more limited sense designated all of painting’s other elements—lines, shapes,
and their distribution in space—that contributed to the work’s overall composi-
tion. In introducing this new distinction, Kandinsky also suggested a parallel be-
tween the two senses of “form,” which, had he written it out in its simplest terms,
would have looked roughly as follows:

form1 (i.e., form in its broader sense) : content :: form2 : color

By rendering the analogy in this fashion, we’re able to see that for Kandinsky
“form,” in either of its senses, was always the more material of the paired terms
 SECOND MOMENT 35

in question. Just as form at large embodied or gave form to content, so lines and
shapes served to incarnate color, which, in their absence, would be without exten-
sion and so wholly immaterial, the mere idea of this or that hue.
It’s worth pausing here long enough to appreciate what a radical inversion of
traditional art theory Kandinsky’s argument represents. In most of the accounts
preexisting his own, color was considered merely secondary to the primary ele-
ments of form (i.e., contour and shape), since color was seen as being not only
sensuously material but also subject to the vagaries of perception—this in contrast
to the objective intelligibility of line. Repeatedly in Kandinsky’s writings, however,
color is presented as the more absolute or ideal element, an element which in some
sense is only “subsequently” embodied in material form.14
Again, although color and geistige content, and the a nity between them, had
been the main subjects of Über das Geistige, Kandinsky turned his attention in
Punkt und Linie to the explicitly material elements of form, that is, to “form” in its
more limited, linear-geometric sense. e underlying rationale for this change—
as well as for a whole series of future developments—had already been sketched
out in Kandinsky’s 1925 essay “Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow.” at essay unfolds
through a series of eight antithetical terms, each pair of which represents some-
thing like a turn of the dialectical “wheel.” From the most general or universal
statement of the fundamental opposition, between “the materialistic movement”
and its “spiritual” counterpart, we pass on to more particular concerns with the
actual making of art. At this level, Kandinsky opposes an “intuitive method,”
linked to the spiritual (and so also, one infers, to his work from the period of Über
das Geistige), with a more recent “theoretical method” that has its roots in overtly
material concerns.15 “Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow” links this theoretical method
in turn to an “analytical movement,” which is described as “within sight of its nal
conclusion”—and which we might therefore take to be more or less synonymous
with Kandinsky’s own nearly completed work on the manuscript for Punkt und
Linie zu Fläche. Beyond this analytic “conclusion” lies a contrary synthetic move-
ment, “gathering its strength for tomorrow,” as well as that movement’s own pro-
jected results: both a “synthetic, ‘monumental’ art” and a fully eshed out “science
of art” (a pair that might itself one day be reconciled, the text speculates, in some
still greater unity).
Although there is a good deal of overlap among them, and a certain mixing of
the chronological (“movements”) with the technical (“methods”), the terms enu-
merated in the essay are evidently meant to suggest a more or less continuous de-
velopment, reaching from the relatively recent past into what Kandinsky hopes is
the not-too-distant future. e engine driving things forward is the fundamental
dialectical opposition between matter and thought, nature and spirit. Kandinsky
36 PART I — PAIN TING IN THEORY

clearly regarded Punkt und Linie zu Fläche as itself one moment in this develop-
ment, though, again, a moment belonging to the more material side of things.16
To couch this in the language of “Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow,” we might say that
Punkt und Linie draws on Kandinsky’s (INKhUK and Bauhaus) experience with
the “theoretical method of constructing a work”—a method that derives, once
more, from the earlier “materialistic movement”—and points toward a future,
more fully worked-out “science of art.”17
Given its materialistic orientation, we might compare Punkt und Linie zu
Fläche to the Philosophy of Nature, the second of the three books that constitute
Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. In the Encyclopedia, the Philoso-
phy of Nature comes between the Logic and the Philosophy of Spirit, occupying,
then, the “antithetical” position that precedes and prepares the way for an eventual
synthesis. Whereas, in the Logic, Hegel sought to reconstruct the self-determining
development of rational thought (what he referred to there as “the Idea in and
for itself ”), in the second book he turned to “external” nature, to “the Idea in the
form of its otherness.”18 Ultimately that opposition between “pure thought” and
nature—or inner and outer, ideal and real—would be sublated (shown, that is,
to have been only an apparent opposition) in the nal book of his encyclopedic
trilogy, the Philosophy of Spirit.
As “Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow” attests, Kandinsky’s ambition was compara-
bly “encyclopedic,” in the sense that he too sought to develop a complete and
holistic system. Punkt und Linie clearly belongs to that system’s second moment. It
prepares, in e ect, for the eventual embodiment of abstract color—color “as such”
or in and for itself—in visible form, as part of a concrete composition. Like Hegel’s
Philosophy of Nature before it, Kandinsky’s Punkt und Linie zu Fläche was meant to
take its place within a larger, unfolding narrative aimed at the sublation of “inner”
and “outer.” Its ultimate purpose was to show how nature’s materiality was related
to Geist and, conversely, how Geist’s “being-within-itself ” actually “comport[ed]
[with] ‘externality,’” with nature (or matter) conceived of as its “other.”19
My own sense is that Kandinsky had the Philosophy of Nature speci cally in view
when composing Punkt und Linie zu Fläche. His very title invokes the rst section
of Hegel’s text, which opens with a discussion of, precisely, the point, the line, and
the plane, and their logical developments out of one another. As I read it, Kandin-
sky’s title was intended to serve as a reference for the knowing reader to the Philoso-
phy of Nature. It also sets the terms for the (tripartite) structure of Punkt und Linie
zu Fläche, which itself closely resembles the structure of its Hegelian predecessor.
Before turning to those structural similarities, it might be helpful to discuss,
however brie y, Hegel’s stated purpose in the Philosophy of Nature; if nothing
else, it will help to illuminate later Kandinsky’s parallel comments regarding the
 SECOND MOMENT 37

goals of his own theoretical project. With the Philosophy of Nature Hegel sought
to provide a systematic ordering of scienti c knowledge (as it existed in the early
nineteenth century), beginning with its most abstract and undi erentiated com-
ponents—space and time—and working toward the vastly greater complexity of
organic life.20 His intention was to translate the ndings of empirical science into
a conceptual form or structure that could then be viewed in terms of its nonem-
pirical, “internal” necessity. Early in the introduction to the Philosophy of Nature
Hegel contrasted his own speculative method with the method of the empirical
sciences, as well as with “man’s practical approach to Nature.” Both of these, he ar-
gued, considered nature as “something immediate and external,” and man himself
as an “external and therefore [merely] sensuous individual.”21
Echoing Hegel, Kandinsky opened Punkt und Linie zu Fläche by drawing his
own rm distinction between external and internal approaches: “Every phenom-
enon can be experienced in two ways. ese two ways are not random, but bound
up with the phenomena—they are derived from the nature of the phenomena,
from two characteristics of the same: External—Internal.”22 In the paragraphs
following, Kandinsky asserted that his would be an internal examination of the
“material” elements of painting, even though part of his project “—the analytic
part—verges on the tasks of ‘positive’ science.”23 at is, because no real science
of art yet existed, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche would have to establish, in quasi-
positivistic fashion, the basic principles of that science, even as it also sought to
analyze them (à la Hegel) in relation to their underlying conceptual structure.
As already mentioned, Hegel began the rst section of the Philosophy of Nature,
on “Space and Time,” with a discussion of the point, the line, and the plane, and
of their successive developments out of one another. At the start of the text’s nar-
rative, nature is presented as purely external, wholly other to logic or reason. In its
most abstract or universal form, Hegel says, it exists simply as space, completely
undi erentiated (and, in that sense, external even to itself). He then identi es the
point as the negation of space’s di erencelessness, so a negation actually posited in
space. e line, in turn, is described as the “the point existing outside of itself, i.e.
relating itself to space [thereby also generating the concepts of time and motion]
. . . , and the plane, similarly, is the sublated line existing outside of itself.”24
Much the same continuous, dialectical development structures Punkt und
Linie zu Fläche. Kandinsky explicitly says in the introduction that “it is necessary
to organize [the pictorial elements] into an organic series of gradations”25—and
then attempts to follow that logic throughout the remainder of the text. e line
is accordingly described as “the trail left by the point in motion”: “It comes about
through movement—indeed, by destroying the ultimately self-contained repose of
the point. Here we have a leap from the static to the dynamic.”26 e plane is simi-
38 PART I — PAINTING IN THEORY

larly characterized as the result of a line that, responding to the “generative force”
of “inner tensions,” expands to become a plane. e nal section of the book then
broaches the nearly in nite complexity of composition on “that material plane . . .
called upon to accommodate the content of the work of art”27—the picture plane.
e title of Kandinsky’s text—Punkt und Linie zu Fläche—signals both this de-
velopmental progression driving its analysis forward and, as I asserted previously,
the tripartite, characteristically Hegelian structure of the book. e three separate
sections of the Philosophy of Nature had dealt with Mechanics, Physics, and Organ-
ics, in that order. (And that order, once more, is clearly “ascending,” the complex
organisms of the nal chapter being presented as decidedly more sophisticated,
and in nitely more self-aware, than the elementary particles discussed nearer the
beginning of the book.)28 Although Punkt und Linie’s chapters can’t be mapped di-
rectly on to Hegel’s—if they could, all that talk of internal necessity would have to
be regarded as wholly disingenuous—there are enough correspondences between
them to suggest that the Philosophy of Nature served as a frame of reference for
Kandinsky’s study. Until that time when the science of art could establish itself as
a mature and more fully independent discipline, it would evidently have to prog-
ress in part through analogical thinking, by drawing comparisons between picto-
rial elements and other, “lower” forms of matter. It’s not particularly surprising,
then, to discover that Kandinsky’s various descriptions of the graphic point, for
example—as an entity “in repose, absorbed in itself ” or subject to a “tension [that]
is ultimately always concentric”—recall any number of passages in the Mechanics
that treat of statics (i.e., the equilibrium of bodies) and gravitational force.29 e
content of Hegel’s chapter on Physics, which includes, among other things, an ex-
tended discussion of chemistry, likewise resonates with the characterization of line
in Punkt und Linie zu Fläche. roughout we nd parallels, such as in Kandinsky’s
observation that pictorial elements in conjunction behave quite di erently than
they do in isolation. “Comparable facts are not unknown in other sciences,” he
remarks, including “chemistry: the sum of component elements when separated is
not the same as the total produced by their combination.”30
Perhaps the most Hegelian aspect of this middle chapter, however, is its con-
tention that matter is inherently dynamic. “Quite apart from di erences in char-
acter determined by inner tensions,” Kandinsky writes, “and quite apart from any
generative processes, the fundamental source of every line remains the same—
force [Kraft].”31 Hegel, having rejected what he regarded as the outworn explana-
tions of mechanism or atomism, argued that the essence of matter consists not
in mere extension but rather in power or force (Kraft), which expresses itself as
motion.32 at Kandinsky also subscribed to this view—at least where painting’s
formal or “material” elements were concerned—was already made evident (if not
 SECOND MOMENT 39

yet quite explained) in our analysis of Über das Geistige.33 ere it was argued that
Kandinsky conceived of the individual composition on analogy with the dialec-
tical unfolding of the Concept and so also with the historical development of
art. Of course, composition in Über das Geistige was presented as almost entirely
a matter of color; in Punkt und Linie the discussion turns to graphic lines and
shapes, and neither are seen as static:

Tensions, for their part, give expression to the inner aspect of the given element. e
element is the concrete result produced by the force operating upon the material. Line
is the most distinct and simplest instance of this formative process, which occurs every
time with logical precision. . . . us, composition is nothing other than the logically
precise organization of those living forces encapsulated within elements in the guise
of tensions.34

Already here we begin to sense what will become even more apparent in the
following chapter of Punkt und Linie: namely, that for Kandinsky the successful,
uni ed composition is composed not of inherently harmonious or quiescent forms
but rather of carefully balanced tensions, each often straining against the others.
Pictorial elements—lines and shapes—were for him simply external manifesta-
tions of the otherwise unseen “internal” forces that produced them. Consequently,
a certain restlessness animates even the simplest of pictorial con gurations. Kan-
dinsky clearly felt that if abstract composition were to progress beyond a rudimen-
tary, intuitive level, a careful calibration of the tensions in play would be required.
Punkt und Linie was meant as a rst stab in that direction. Eventually, Kandinsky
hoped, it would lead to something much more systematic—something roughly
analogous to the system of opposed-primaries outlined in Über das Geistige but
that, in this case, would facilitate the careful counterbalancing of lines and shapes
or, rather, of the tensions to which they gave visible expression.
e nal chapter of Punkt und Linie addresses composition on the picture
plane and, even more than the preceding two chapters, does so in terms highly
evocative of the Philosophy of Nature. is time the parallels are speci cally with
Hegel’s third section (“Organics”), which concerns complex organic systems such
as plants and animals. “Systems” of this type, Hegel emphasized, possess a special
kind of unity. ey are not to be understood as comprising merely parts de ned
in relation to one other; rather, an organism’s constituents are members that could
not exist in isolation from the whole. As he argued in both the Encyclopedia Logic
and then again in the Aesthetics, a hand severed from the body is no longer a hand:
it “loses its independent subsistence; it does not remain what it was in the organ-
ism; its mobility, agility, shape, color, etc., are changed; indeed it decomposes and
perishes altogether.”35 Kandinsky, already in his 1913 essay “Painting as Pure Art,”
40 PART I — PAINTING IN THEORY

had de ned the work of art as a “spiritual organism,” and directly evoked Hegel’s
understanding of the special unity thereby implied:

In isolation, [its] individual parts are lifeless, like a chopped-o nger. e life of the
nger, its e ectiveness, is determined by its ordered juxtaposition with other parts of
the body. is ordered juxtaposition is called construction. Like the work of nature,
the work of art is subordinated to the same law, that of construction. e individual
parts have life only by virtue of the whole. 36

In Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, Kandinsky would assert that not just the painting
but the picture plane itself possessed this kind of integrated unity. e picture plane
is an “admittedly primitive but living organism,” he wrote, yet one that, “if correctly
treated, [will be] transformed into a new, living organism that is no longer primitive
but manifests all the characteristics of a developed organism.”37 Most of the chap-
ter focuses on the lower, “primitive” end of this hierarchy; it analyzes the tensions
inherent in di erent quadrants of the picture plane, for example, or how those of a
rectangular canvas oriented horizontally di er from the tensions in a canvas of the
same dimensions turned to the vertical. e twenty- ve black-and-white drawings
and one color reproduction that make up the book’s appendix are the closest we
come within Punkt und Linie itself to anything approaching the complexity of a fully
“developed organism.” For precisely that reason, I’m inclined to regard the appendix
as absolutely integral, rather than extraneous, to the text. It serves as the proper
conclusion to Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, the place where the elements isolated and
analyzed in the preceding chapters are brought together in the context of individual,
“synthetic” compositions.38 Near the beginning of the text, Kandinsky had described
“his idea of the concept ‘composition’ [des Begriffes “Komposition” ]” as

the internally purposive [innerlich-zweckmäßige ] subordination of

1. individual elements [and]
2. the structure (construction)
to a concrete pictorial goal.39

Again, I take it that the drawings of the appendix are compositions of this sort,
lacking color, to be sure, but otherwise “manifest[ing] all the characteristics of a
developed organism.” (Such self-sustaining, “organic” functioning presumably is
their pictorial purposiveness or goal.) But Kandinsky would also have us see that
“organic unity” is often achieved through the coordinated interaction of extremely
diverse—perhaps even antithetical—elements:

e overall harmony of a composition can . . . reside in a number of complexes that

themselves scale the heights of contrast. ese contrasts can even have a disharmonious
 SECOND MOMENT 41

character; nonetheless, if correctly used they will a ect the overall harmony not in a
negative, but in a positive way, lifting the work to the highest level of harmonic being.40

To the extent that the drawings of the appendix are meant to put into practice
the principles articulated in the text, it might behoove us at this point to look
closely at one of those drawings in particular. No doubt all of them would reward
our attention in one way or another. Yet given the constraints of time and atten-
tion, I’ve chosen to focus on plate 20 (Figure 13); if it is more involved than many
of the appendix’s other compositions, it is not yet so complicated as to pose a seri-
ous challenge to verbal description. My aim is to discuss the drawing exclusively in
the terms used in Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, so that what follows is, quite literally,
a by-the-book analysis.

FIGURE 13. Wassily Kandinsky, Drawing for plate 20 of the appendix to Punkt und Linie zu Fläche,
1926. © Christie’s Images Limited, 2013. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
42 PART I — PAINTING IN THEORY

THE MAIN LINES OF ACTION in the composition are laid down by the two counter-
thrusting diagonals that cross above and ever so slightly to the right of the cen-
ter of the picture plane.41 One of these, the one descending from upper left to
lower right, is what Kandinsky described as an “unharmonic diagonal,” in that it
joins together the two most disparately weighted quadrants of the picture plane.42
Appropriately enough, then, that diagonal appears not as a single line but rather
as the “con icting combination” of an independently undulating curve with a
“colder” but still “dramatic” zigzag.43 e other (“harmonic”) diagonal, rising in
the opposite direction, is in itself a combination of contrasts, in that its uneven,
obviously hand-drawn external limits suggest qualities very di erent (in tactility
and “sound”) from the utterly straight line we sense existing at its core.44 e
entire X-shaped con guration is rounded out by a collection of arcs and short,
straight lines that both articulate the pull exerted by the corners of the page and
serve as counterweights to one another.45 e tautness of the arrangement turns
on the presence of these marks; were it not for them, the energy of the major
diagonals would have dissipated a short distance from their crossing. Similarly,
the composition as a whole, which might otherwise appear to be drifting toward
the upper right-hand corner, is pulled back by the circular “point” along the pic-
ture plane’s lower edge.46 at concentric point, “burrowing into the surface,” an-
chors itself to the page—but only so that the other elements, despite their much
greater size and “mass,” might seem to oat freely from it.47
In all, the drawing exempli es three of the most important principles ad-
vanced in Punkt und Linie zu Fläche. First, no single element dominates the
composition, and all seem integral to the organic functioning or “inner purpo-
siveness” of the whole. Second, many of those elements are nonetheless antitheti-
cal to one another; they generate “disharmonious contrasts” that still manage,
in the context of the work, to reach a kind of harmonic reconciliation. Finally,
even the fundamental opposition between materiality and immateriality is at least
provisionally overcome—principally via that “point” which, in adhering so rmly
to the lower edge of the picture plane, produces the illusion of the plane’s de-
realization above. “ e practiced eye,” Kandinsky wrote near the end of Punkt
und Linie, “must possess the ability to see that plane which is necessary for the
work of art . . . [and] to ignore it when it dons the guise of space.”48
If such an analysis rings at all true to our experience of the drawing, we may
be tempted to see Punkt und Linie zu Fläche along lines similar to those used
to characterize the Philosophy of Nature and any number of other Hegelian texts
(save, of course, the anomalous Aesthetics). e book might be said to take us
from an initial, undi erentiated unity (the point) through a second moment of
particularity, in which individual elements (lines and the various shapes they en-
 SECOND MOMENT 43

gender) are nely di erentiated from one another, and then nally to a concrete
individuality (the developed composition on the picture plane) that manages to
integrate those earlier, antithetical moments so as to achieve a complex (and no
longer merely “material”) unity-in-di erence. If that account in turn rings true,
we may also be inclined to see the dialectical rhyme between the point and the
composition on the plane as signi cant—the self-supporting, organic unity of the
latter marking a return “at a higher level” of the former’s “self-absorbed repose.” In
itself, there’s nothing particularly surprising in this; the movement of the dialectic
periodically produces such recurrences. (Indeed that sort of recurrence is precisely
what allows Hegel to break up the continuity of history into distinct chronological
“periods.”) Less expected, however, is that the language Kandinsky uses to describe
the point—as “an introverted entity pregnant with possibilities” or, again, an el-
ement “in repose, absorbed in itself”—very closely approximates the phrasing
Hegel had used to describe the work of classical sculpture.49
Once more, it’s an important feature of the Aesthetics that the unity char-
acteristic of the classical does not recur at a later moment within the text. e
classical may be the apex of art, but it arises in the middle of Hegel’s histori-
cal narrative, after which point we witness gradual dissolution and dispersal.
Never again, Hegel claims, does art attain the plenitude it enjoyed in classical
Greece. When Geist does eventually realize a totality rivaling and even surpassing
that of Greek sculpture—such that that sculpture can be seen, in some sense,
to have “pre gured” the later moment—it does so not as art but as philosophy.
More speci cally, it does so in the form of the Hegelian system of “absolute
knowing.”50 By extension, if the similarities between Kandinsky’s description of
the point and Hegel’s characterization of classical sculpture are not mere co-
incidence, they invest the realized composition on the plane with a profound
signi cance. e internally purposive, organic totality that, according to Punkt
und Linie, the successful composition ultimately is might then also be regarded
as the pictorial equivalent of Hegel’s philosophical system, with its complex, self-
supporting structure.51
At best this is a thought that remains only nascent or inchoate in Kandinsky’s
text. To the extent that he was aware of it at all, he may have imagined a fuller ar-
ticulation in some future book—perhaps one belonging to the still-to-come “syn-
thetic movement” forecast in “Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow.” Had that book been
written, it might also have provided the opportunity to synthesize, and so advance
beyond, the particular arguments of Über das Geistige and Punkt und Linie zu
Fläche. Unfortunately (perhaps), there was no subsequent book—nor even any ex-
tended essay in which that thought was again taken up and developed. Or, rather,
there was no subsequent essay by Kandinsky. One might regard “Les Peintures
44 PART I — PAINTING IN THEORY

concrètes,” which was written by Kojève at the explicit request of his uncle, as
ful lling exactly that role.52 As we’ll see, there is a real sense in which it can be said
to reconcile not only Kandinsky’s own two previous texts but also both of them
with the larger argument of Hegel’s Aesthetics. In any case, it is to “Les Peintures
concrètes” that we now turn.