Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 16 Number 3, December 2015
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FLORMAN, Lisa Concerning the Spiritual—and the Concrete—in Kandinsky’s Art. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2014, 280 PP, Cloth ISBN: 9780804784832, Paper ISBN: 9780804784849, Digital ISBN: 9780804789233, FROM $25.95 (US)
Reviewed by
This is a useful book. It makes a valuable contribution to distilling contemporary art in the early going of the 20th century, and the zeitgeist that influenced seminal painters like Wassily Kandinsky.
Lisa Florman admits she’s not keen on prior readings of the disposition of Kandinsky’s art; the belief that his abstract eye was informed by spiritual dimensions, such as those proposed by Theosophy, and an entire art movement that grew out of mysticism. “I don’t want to deny the significance of such things,” she writes out of the gate, “even though I want (italics her emphasis) to deny their significance, I find I can’t entirely.”
A professor of the history of art at Ohio State University, Dr. Florman draws attention to the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, and in a Hegelian trajectory proposes a new synthesis of what the German word geist meant to Kandinsky. If her argument holds—that Kandinsky’s writing was mostly inspired by Hegel’s series of 19th century lectures on Aesthetics—modern readers will be led toward a different understanding of On [or Concerning] the Spiritual in Art, the artist’s influential 1911 essay.
I’m not completely convinced, but Florman is persuasive and brings a smoking gun to the tableau (pun intended): Alexandre Kojève, the abstract painter’s nephew and highly regarded interpreter of Hegel’s philosophy.
In a hitherto neglected Depression era article that only came to light in 1985 (and Florman translates as The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky), it’s Kojève’s assertion, for one, that his uncle was riffing off of Hegel’s ideas concerning the phenomenology of spirit. And he should know because Kandinsky solicited and respected his opinions.
A technical point of Aesthetics, but an important one: Hegel is less concerned with Blavatsky-style mysticism, and more about “the end of art” as a means of inculcation—questioning the usefulness of its imagery and semiotics—in the development of one’s spirit (a formidable task, as much as it is perplexing). If you follow and agree with Florman’s insight: Kandinsky counter argued that his style of non-representational painting and the ‘spirit’ of abstract works of art put Hegel’s thesis very much in doubt.
And that Kandinsky wrote in German and not his native Russian: Florman cites this as more proof “that he intended Über das Geistiges as a fairly direct response to the Aesthetics,” and that one of his “principle motives for writing in German was that he wanted to use the same language—in many passages, even precisely the same phrasing—that Hegel himself had employed,” almost a century earlier.
Concerning the Spiritual—and the Concrete—in Kandinsky’s Art is a welcome addition and worthy companion to illuminate the philosophy of arts-based practices, 19th century ideals, and abstraction in the twentieth. I think Florman’s book will be most useful as comparative literature, a kind of midrash commentary on the genesis of contemporary art. That said, there are gaps—perhaps oversights—understandable given the author’s admitted aversion to spiritualist thinking and squishiness particular to Kandinsky’s day.
I believe the reader will be rewarded by another remarkable analysis of Kandinsky. Long before his arrival in Munich, the artist took a trip into the Russian wilderness; it was there that he encountered shamanism, and perhaps was influenced by it. His writing and sketches of the journey tell of a supernatural landscape and sorcery that may have had a profound affect on his budding art career. Kandinsky and Old Russia (1986) is a scholarly tour de force that sadly has been overlooked due to the untimely death of its author Peg Weiss.
Both of these books come highly recommended.