Daniel Barbiero
Critical Essay
In his classic history of abstract painting, Belgian painter Michel Seuphor claims, Virginia Woolf-like, that on or around 1912 Western painting changed. Several avant-garde painters broke with the Western representational tradition and founded a new tradition based on an ostensibly subjectless abstraction. This was a revolutionary change, demanding not only new ways of painting, but new ways of seeing and thinking about art. One notable attempt to rethink art from this new perspective of non-representational painting was Alexandre Kojève’s essay on the work of Wassily Kandinsky, Les Peintres concrète Kandinskys.
Kojève’s relationship to Kandinsky’s painting was intimate, indeed, familial. The artist was Kojève’s father’s half-brother, making him Kojève’s “Uncle Vasya”.. Shortly after the Bolshevik coup, Kojève left his native Russia for Poland, but in 1920 was expelled on suspicion of being a soviet agent and went to Berlin.. The person he stayed with was Kandinsky. He remained close to “Uncle Vasya.” And,in fact, it was Kandinsky who asked Kojève to write an essay on his painting.
Beyond this family connection, Kandinsky was a well-chosen subject from which to approach the meaning of the new painting. Kandinsky was not only one of the first artists to adopt abstraction, but one who, in later years, claimed that in 1910 he was the first to have created a fully abstract painting. Uncertainty over the actual date the painting has rendered his claim doubtful, but his importance as a pathfinder for the new painting is beyond dispute. He was among the first abstractionists, a group that included František Kupka, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, Robert Delaunay, and Hilma af Klint. In addition, he was the first to develop a theory of abstraction with his treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art), drafted as early as 1909 and published in late 1911.
Like Kupka, Mondrian, Malevich, and af Klint, Kandinsky was deeply influenced by the occult doctrines of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy and Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy. Both were fashionable among artists and writers at the turn of the last century; their influence impacted both the form and content of much of the avant-garde painting and poetry of early Modernism. Kandinsky’s own theory of abstraction reflects a number of ideas he derived from them.
The abstractions Kandinsky began painting in the 1910s also developed out of his earlier Fauvist and Pointillist work. His discovery of the expressive force of color as an independent formal element dates back to that early work, as does his loosening of the strictures of representational form. Subsequent experience with the Blue Rider group and the Bauhaus brought him to an appreciation of geometric form that also found expression in the later abstract work.
Kojève’s essay on Kandinsky was written in 1936, at the midpoint of the famous seminar he gave on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. It would remain unpublished until 1966, when a shortened version appeared. The full version would not see publication until 1985. Lisa Florman’s English translation was first published in her 2014 book Concerning the Spiritual and the Concrete in Kandinsky’s Art, and has been reprinted in an elegant 2022 edition put out by David Zwirmer, with an introduction by Kojève scholar Boris Groys. Florman’s translation was done directly from the source in the handwritten manuscript held by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and corrects errors of transcription that appeared in the essay’s 1985 publication.
Les Peintres concrète Kandinskys is a very different undertaking from the Hegel seminar. It’s a short work and employs a conceptual vocabulary quite distinct from that of the seminar.Although it addresses Kandinsky’s art, it is more than a piece of art criticism about a particular artist’s work. It is in effect a sketch of a theory of non-representational art and its capacity to embody what Kojève calls, in insistent uppercase, the Beautiful. It is as just such a theory of non-representational art that I would like to consider it.
The Beautiful in Art I
Kojève begins by drawing a distinction between the Beautiful as it occurs within art and as it occurs in the everyday world. As he puts it, the “Beautiful-in-Art is not the Beautiful-in-non-Art” (p. 27). His assertion is that for the thing as we encounter it and get to know it in the real world, outside of art, beauty is only a secondary consideration – something “in addition” to what it is. What it is is, primarily, a kind of thing, which as the kind of thing it is, has certain functions it is meant to fill or purposes to which it is meant to be put. The thing in the real world, is defined in the first instance by its ontological status (the type of thing it is) and its teleology (its purposes). The thing as portrayed in art, by contrast, is not the thing itself—a point famously made in pictorial terms by Magritte in his The Treachery of Images (“This is Not a Pipe”). As the image of the thing, it obviously has neither the ontological status nor the teleology of the actual thing – we can’t pick it up and use it as we would use the thing itself. since it’s only the image of the thing. Kojève further argues that the painted image of the thing is not an image of the thing per se, but rather of the beauty of the thing or in the thing. In order to appear in art, Kojève argues, the beauty in the thing we encounter in the real world must be drawn out from it by the artist, whose art is “the art of ‘extracting’ the beautiful from the being (real, useful, etc.) that is ‘also’ beautiful and incarnating it” (p. 29).
In contrast to the thing, whose beauty is a secondary feature relative to its primary uses, for the painted image, to be beautiful is its primary purpose. And to be beautiful is an end in itself. The Beautiful is a “value” in and of itself, “simply because it is”, something with no utilitarian function or ulterior instrumental purpose. Kojève summarizes it in these explicitly ontological terms: “The Beautiful is being that has a value on account of the simple fact of its being, in itself, for itself, by itself” (p. 31). As Florman remarks in a note on this passage, Kojève’s formula of “in itself, for itself, by itself” conforms to the Hegelian definition of the Absolute (p. 67, n. 5).
We might conclude that, for Kojève, the art of painting is the art of extracting a transcendent value—an existent-in,-for,-and-by-itself value—“the Beautiful”—from a thing in the world, and portraying it with or through an image of the thing from which it has been extracted. But such a conclusion would be premature. Kojève has yet to play the ace up his sleeve.
The Beautiful in Art II
What we have seen Kojève formulate so far is a theory of the Beautiful in representational art— that is, art that represents or reproduces objects or other entities that exist, or might exist, in the outside world. Because it is in relation to these that the artist, through his or her subjective choices, extracts the beauty in them, Kojève claims that representational art is a subjective, abstract art. Kojève’s use of “abstract” here runs against common convention, but it is meant only as a synonym for “extract” and not as the name of a style. “Abstraction” represents one moment in the creation of the representational painting, as well as the consequent quality the painting will have. This contrasts with “concrete,” which latter is the quality he finds in art that doesn’t purport to mimic or reproduce things in the world—art we ordinarily call “abstract,” but which Kojève calls “non-representational.” What appears as a minor point of semantics, is actually essential to Kojeve’s point:: non-representational art doesn’t abstract the beauty from a real-world object that happens, as a secondary thing, to embody that beauty, but instead creates it. This is the ace Kojève has been holding.
By Kojève’s lights, the Beautiful comes to non-representational painting on its own merits as something virtually ex nihilo because it isn’t derived (“abstracted”) from something already found in the world. While the Beautiful in representational painting is embodied in images of existing or potentially existing things in the world beyond the painting—and, for that reason, are bound to the given of the world as it already is—in non-representational painting the Beautiful is a purely pictorial phenomenon that has no prior or derived existence. Given its independence, both from the things of the world and from the artistic judgment needed to abstract the Beautiful from them, non-representational painting counts as a concrete (because not abstracted) and objective (because not the product of subjective choice) art.
The “Total” Tableau
The upshot of this, in this kind of non-representational art, is that the Beautiful is fully autonomous from the external world and wholly immanent within the painting that embodies it. This underscores the ontological claim Kojève makes for the objectivity of the non-representational painting. He asserts that non-representational paintings are “painted objects” rather than paintings “of objects”: they are “objective paintings” (p. 57). This is more than a play on words; rather, it is a claim for the non-representational painting’s independent ontological status: because it does not contain the image of a real or possibly real object, it achieves a meaningful independent objecthood of its own. It is complete in itself; a total universe rather than a recognizable fragment of the real world. Kojève calls it a “ ‘total’ tableau” which, in not being the representation of a thing as seen through the subjective eyes of the artist, is itself a thing — “the thing itself” (p. 55), which “is as objects are, that is, it is in an absolute and nonrelative way; it is independently of its relations with anything else; it is, like the Universe is” (p. 57), a “complete and real Universes existing in-by-and-for-[itself] in the same way that the real, nonartistic Universe does” (pp. 57–58).
The “total tableau” as a “complete and real Universe existing in-by-and-for-[itself] in the same way that the real, nonartistic Universe does” brings to mind Kojève’s comments from his Hegel lectures, on what makes the human distinctively human. In short, humans are temporally constituted beings impelled, through biological need or interpersonally shaped desire, to remake our environment in order to realize the future state our needs and desires compel us to attempt to bring about. As Kojève put it,
[T]he profound basis of Hegelian anthropology is formed by this idea that Man is not a Being that is in an eternal identity to itself…but a Nothingness that nihilates as Time…through the negation or transformation of the given, starting from an idea or an ideal that does not yet exist, that is still nothingness (a ‘project’)… (Introduction, p. 48)
What is to stop us from saying that as a “total tableau,” the non-representational painting is pure negation and overcoming of the given through the creation of something new and imaginatively independent of it?
“Circle-Triangle”
Kojève’s remarks on the “total tableau” quoted above arrive in the context of his discussion of Kandinsky’s drawing “Circle-Triangle” which, as Florman points out, is a hypothetical work (Florman p. 59), even if one that is for Kojève exemplary of the autonomously existent, objective “total tableau”:
The Beautiful of “Circle-Triangle” exists nowhere outside of that tableau…This Beautiful was created by the artist…[it] did not exist before the tableau, and it does not exist outside of it, independent of it. (p. 50)
Kojève’s ontological argument—that the tableau is an independent object in the world whose content, and hence embodiment, of the Beautiful doesn’t replicate or mimic anything already in the world – seems uncontroversial. But what of the claim to objectivity—that a “total tableau” like, “Circle-Triangle,” is, in some sense, objective? In the passage quoted above, Kojève concedes that Kandinsky “created” the work, and subsequently acknowledges that it “would not exist without Kandinsky” (p. 54). Yet, he denies that this entails a subjective origin. Here he deploys an argument-by-analogy to the process of birth, asserting that “‘to be born’ from someone does not mean ‘to be born from a subject or subjectivity’” (p. 54). Something about this doesn’t seem quite right. Is birth (a spontaneous, physiological process) analogous to the creation of a work involving the presumably skillful crafting of an object meant to realize in material form the vision, idea, or sensation, of the artist? Kojève’s analogy might make sense if we take it to mean that the “total tableau” isn’t the result of an intentional choice, but arises from some unconscious or preconscious, and thus pre-subjective, creative impulse—although he doesn’t say. But even so, the parallel to birth seems strained, an inapt metaphor–an explaining away without explanation.
The Beautiful Will Be Existential, or It Will Not Be
But the question of the non-representational painting’s purported objectivity is an important one. Is “objective” really what best describes it? Consider that even if we presuppose the creation of the “total tableau” as involving an origin in a pre-subjective state, something particular to the artist will come through. As the late philosopher Gianni Vattimo has suggested, art potentially has what he called an ontological bearing by virtue of which it discloses the artist’s world. For me, this means that work of this kind will have an irreducibly existential dimension: that it will, whether because of itself or in spite of itself, reflect and convey something about the artist’s way of projecting him- or herself into the world through action, intentions both conscious and unconscious, concerns, affective attunement or mood, and so forth. (For this reason, I prefer to say that such an art has an existential bearing.)
In practical terms, this disclosure may manifest itself (when it does manifest itself) not only in the imaginative content of the work, but in the artist’s idiolectical handling and transformation of the elements of his or her chosen medium, the choice of which is itself disclosive. These elements include its iconography, formal vocabulary, materials, manner of presentation, and so forth—elements which entail some degree of choice on the part of the artist. For what may begin as an unconscious impulse will eventually reveal itself through the imaginative resources, skilled craftsmanship, and aesthetic judgment, like the artist’s fingerprints – unique and identifying – marking the object. Even if we accept the origin of the work in a pre-subjective impulse, we might want to concede that it has to realize itself in ways we would ordinarily, albeit hastily, be tempted to designate as “subjective.” But I think Kojève is right to reject that term, and not only for nonrepresentational painting.
To invoke Hegelian language once again, the negation through which the non-representational painting—and indeed, any kind of artwork—overcomes the given consists in the artist’s own manner of imaginatively projecting something other than the given, and then acting to realizing it. It is through this imaginative projection in particular that the ontological ground is cleared, leaving an opening through which the artist’s world can be disclosed—assuming that both the artist and the art are capable of disclosing it.
In disclosing a world in this way, it seems that something larger than, or perhaps better, prior to, “subjectivity” is involved. To the extent that subjectivity is involved, it is a subjectivity already participating in a common milieu defined and mediated by a given—what Wittgenstein called a form of life—and a given in relation to which its own negation through the artist’s imaginative projection is made, and grasped as, meaningful.Yet this negation, even if we hesitate to call it “subjective,” is just as misleadingly described as “objective.” It is something in between: mediated and mediating, always-already meaningful yet liable to assimilation, translation, and projection. In the work that depends upon it—and is driven by the desire to move beyond it—it is taken up and transformed.
The more compelling account would hold that the Beautiful in non-representational painting is grounded neither in subjectivity nor in objectivity, but in existence itself: it is existential. In rejecting the subjectivity-objectivity binary, and reinterpreting Kojève’s criterion of objectivity in existential terms, we’d be putting out of play one move through which he sets nonrepresentational, “total tableaux” apart from other kinds of painting. Given the existential as a common ground, rather than objectivity as a dividing quality, we would be free to see the Beautiful—if we want to continue to think of it as an Ideal worthy of capitalization –as a potential quality of artworks of different types. We might say, altering a famous formula by Hegel seminar attendee,André Breton, that the Beautiful will be existential, or it will not be.
Ascribing an existential dimension to the non-representational work would seem to run up against Kojève’s dicta regarding the autonomy and objectivity of this kind of art, and its independence relative to the artist. But it’s nevertheless true—as he concedes in the case of Kandinsky’s paintings—that for all of their purported independence from their creator, these works were created by Kandinsky and, I would add, in a style unique to him. To claim, as Kojève does, that they were created by Kandinsky ex nihilo is to force the question of what exactly this “nothingness” is from which they emerged. As I’ve suggested, it is the imaginative negation of the given—through which the artist’s way of being in the world opens a clearing through which to project itself into the work.
Kandinsky’s way of being in the world was to be concerned with creating beauty. His non-representational paintings are beautiful, in addition to being Beautiful in Kojève’s sense. For, in addition to whatever ontological and teleological qualities they may embody as per Kojève, they embody aesthetic qualities we’d ordinarily consider beautiful as well—proportion of composition, harmony of color, continuity of rhythm, clarity of line, and unity of mood. To be sure, some of these are qualities traditionally associated with beauty, even if the non-representational works that carry them aren’t traditional in any conventional sense. But I myself am agnostic as to the relative capacity of any particular kind of art to have an existential bearing, and/or to embody beauty. Or Beauty.
Afterword: The Problem of Non-Representational Content
I’ve addressed Kojève’s essay on the Beautiful as a theory interesting in its own right on theoretical grounds, But there also is a historical context to it that I would like to acknowledge here, if only briefly. It seems to me that Kojève was taking up one of the central questions raised by the early creators of non-representational art: If the subject matter of the painting doesn’t derive from entities or events, real or imagined, existing in the outside world, whence does it derive? if it’s to be more than decoration or the merely subjective playing around with forms and colors? Early creators of non-representational art, in other words, needed to justify their highly unconventional work with some set of criteria that transcended purely personal aesthetic or emotional choices. Drawing on the doctrines of Theosophy and Anthroposophy, Kandinsky solved the problem by appealing to an occult spiritual dimension that, through a variety of introspection, the artist must gain access to and then convey in the composition of the painting. The source of the meaning or content of non-representational painting would thus consist in this latter, spiritual dimension. In order to refute the objection that this introspectively attained spiritual dimension was merely a subjective phenomenon, Kandinsky drew a distinction between the spiritual and the psychological. The latter, he claimed, was the product of personal experience whereas the former transcended mere personal experience. Kandinsky’s distinction between the psychological and the spiritual corresponds roughly to Kojève’s distinction between the subjective and the objective, though of course Kojève doesn’t attribute the non-representational artwork’s objectivity to an origin in a hidden spiritual dimension.
My own “solution” to the problem of non-representational meaning is based on a kind of associationism grounded in what could be called the existential unconscious. Briefly, unconscious assumptions and associations reflecting existential concerns particular to the individual artist transmit themselves through an intention to objectify that is, through the conscious desire to convey something through the artwork. In “The Creative Act” Marcel Duchamp offers a convincing account of how this process of transmission works. For Duchamp, the creative act consists of several steps along a path leading from the upsurge of an initial, wholly intuitive creative impulse or intention to its final realization in the art object. In between, the artist translates his or her creative intention into a series of aesthetic reactions, through which raw material is transmuted into a meaningful work of art. Duchamp cautions that in the process of transmutation there emerges a difference between what the artist meant to express and what the work actually does express. This “personal ‘art coefficient,’” as Duchamp calls it, represents meaning latent in the work that the artist him- or herself was unaware of. Even if unintended, this meaning nevertheless originates in, and reflects, the artist’s existential unconscious and is embodied in the aesthetic judgments ultimately rooted in the artist’s idiosyncratic assimilation of the tools, materials, formal vocabulary, methods, and so forth of the traditions within which he or she works. The initial desire itself may range from a conscious “message” to a vague impulse or sensation partly evading conscious articulation.
Does this represent another kind of subjectivism? More broadly, must non-representational art in the end always come down to the personal, the psychological, the subjective—whether we conceive of these as conscious choices or unconscious leanings? It seems to me that when we attempt to answer such questions, we’re attempting to pry open the black box of creativity, only to discover that it is not merely a black box, but one containing boxes-within-boxes.
References
Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo, 1973).
Lisa Florman, Concerning the Spiritual and the Concrete in Kandinsky’s Art (Stanford: Stanford U Press, 2014). Internal cites to Florman.
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, tr. M.T.H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977).
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond Queneau, edited by Allan Bloom, translated by James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell U Press/Agora Books, 1980). Internal cite to Introduction.
Alexandre Kojève, Kandinsky: Incarnating Beauty, tr. Lisa Florman, introduction by Boris Groys (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2022). Internal cites to this work are to page number only.
Michel Seuphor, Abstract Painting: Fifty Years of Accomplishment from Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock (New York: Dell Laurel Editions, 1964.)Gianni Vattimo, “The Ontological Vocation in Twentieth-Century Poetics,” in Art’s Claim to Truth, ed. Santiago Zabala, tr. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia U Press, 2008).
Daniel Barbiero writes about the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in After the Art, Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Rain Taxi, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Utriculi, and elsewhere. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press; his score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press).
Photo Credit: Marcia K. Bilyk is an essayist, photographer, and retired pastor. She lives in rural New Jersey with her husband and two dogs. Her photos have appeared in The Sun, Gothamist, Brevity, Humana Obscura, Adirondack Review, Split Rock Review, Burning Wood Literary Journal, Tiferet Journal, Adirondack Review, Brevity, and elsewhere.
L'Esprit Literary Review 