what is abstract art essay

Abstract art

Abstract art is art that does not attempt to represent an accurate depiction of a visual reality but instead uses shapes, colours, forms and gestural marks to achieve its effect

Wassily Kandinsky Cossacks (1910–1) Tate

Strictly speaking, the word abstract means to separate or withdraw something from something else.

The term can be applied to art that is based on an object, figure or landscape, where forms have been simplified or schematised.

It is also applied to art that uses forms, such as geometric shapes or gestural marks, which have no source at all in an external visual reality. Some artists of this ‘pure’ abstraction have preferred terms such as concrete art or non-objective art , but in practice the word abstract is used across the board and the distinction between the two is not always obvious.

Abstract art is often seen as carrying a moral dimension, in that it can be seen to stand for virtues such as order, purity, simplicity and spirituality.

Since the early 1900s, abstract art has formed a central stream of modern art .

Abstraction across a century

Juan Gris Bottle of Rum and Newspaper (1913–14) Tate

Sonia Delaunay Electric Prisms 1913

Orphism (1912–13): Coined by the French poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire. The name comes from the musician Orpheus in ancient Greek myths, as Apollinaire thought that painting should be like music. Main artists Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay also used the term simultanism to describe their work of this period.

Kazimir Malevich Dynamic Suprematism (1915 or 1916) Tate

Naum Gabo Model for ‘Construction in Space ‘Two Cones’’ (1927) Tate

The Work of Naum Gabo © Nina & Graham Williams / Tate, London 2023

Theo van Doesburg Counter-Composition VI (1925) Tate

Joan Miró Painting (1927) Tate

© Successió Miro/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2002

Morris Louis Alpha-Phi (1961) Tate

© The estate of Morris Louis

Cubist and fauvist artists depended on the visual world for their subject matter but opened the door for more extreme approaches to abstraction. Pioneers of ‘pure’ abstract painting were Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian from about 1910–20. A pioneer of abstract sculpture, which took reference from the modern world was the Russian constructivist Naum Gabo .

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Selected artists working with abstraction

Piet mondrian, the first abstract artist (and it's not kandinsky).

Wassily Kandinsky is generally regarded as the pioneer of abstract art. However, a Swedish woman called Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) might claim that title

Fahrelnissa Zeid

Wassily kandinsky, lászló moholy-nagy, bottle and fishes, pablo picasso, dame barbara hepworth, david bomberg, ben nicholson om, mark rothko, howard hodgkin.

There are many theoretical ideas behind abstract art. While some have taken the idea of 'art for art’s sake' (that art should be purely about the creation of beautiful effects), others have proposed art can or should be like music, in that just as music is patterns of sound, art’s effects should be created by pure patterns of form, colour and line. The idea, derived from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, that the highest form of beauty lies not in the forms of the real world but in geometry, is also used in discussion of abstract art, as is the idea that abstract art, since it does not represent the material world, can be seen to represent the spiritual.

Explore this term

Abstraction sans frontières.

Éric de Chassey

The show at Tate St Ives this summer explores the international context which shaped the work of artists in the Cornish town from the 1940s to 1960s. As Éric de Chassey writes, the broad exchange of ideas was not limited to American artists such as Rothko and de Kooning, but extended to French painters such as Nicolas de Staël, which would also reflect a shared interest in nature and landscape

Optimistic abstraction

Gavin Delahunty

The curator of the forthcoming exhibition by the German abstract painter introduces her work, and a fellow artist pays homage

Chance and Intention: Gerhard Richter’s Abstractions

In this talk art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh looks in great detail at Richter’s responses to painters like Lucio Fontana, Jean Fautrier, and Robert Rauschenberg in 1962

Abstract Connections conference audio recordings

Audio recordings of Abstract Connections conference, held in conjunction with two major exhibitions, Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World and Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective at Tate Modern.

Coral and Lichen, Brains and Bowels: Jay DeFeo’s Hybrid Abstraction

Catherine Spencer

Situating the US artist Jay DeFeo within a network of West Coast practitioners during the 1950s and 1960s, this essay shows how her relief paintings – layered with organic, geological and bodily referents – constitute what can be understood as ‘hybrid abstraction’. This has affinities with ‘eccentric abstraction’ and ‘funk art’, but also resonates with the socio-political context of Cold War America.

Abstraction Across Media: David Smith conference audio recordings

Audio recording from the conference Abstraction Across Media: David Smith, with Anne Wagner (University of California, Berkeley), David Anfam (Phaidon Press), Alex Potts (University of Michigan), Jeremy Lewison and Rebecca Smith, daughter of the artist

Related Movements

Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted

Fauvism is the name applied to the work produced by a group of artists (which included Henri Matisse and André Derain) from around 1905 to 1910, which is characterised by strong colours and fierce brushwork

Suprematism

Name given by the artist Kazimir Malevich to the abstract art he developed from 1913 characterised by basic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colours

Constructivism

Constructivism was a particularly austere branch of abstract art founded by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko in Russia around 1915

An early form of abstract art characterised by interacting linear forms derived from rays of light

Simultanism

Term invented by artist Robert Delaunay to describe the abstract painting developed by him and his wife Sonia Delaunay from about 1910

Term used to describe the non-geometric abstract art that developed in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s characterized by spontaneous brushwork, drips and scribble-like marks

Neo-plasticism

Neo-plasticism is a term adopted by the Dutch pioneer of abstract art, Piet Mondrian, for his own type of abstract painting which used only horizontal and vertical lines and primary colours

Concrete art

Concrete art is abstract art that is entirely free of any basis in observed reality and that has no symbolic meaning

Objective abstraction

The term objective abstraction refers to a non-geometric style of abstract art developed by a group of British artists in 1933

Abstract expressionism

Abstract expressionism is the term applied to new forms of abstract art developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often characterised by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity

Minimalism is an extreme form of abstract art developed in the USA in the 1960s and typified by artworks composed of simple geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle

Post-painterly abstraction

Post-painterly abstraction is a blanket term covering a range of new developments in abstract painting in the late 1950s and early 1960s, characterised by a more rigorous approach to abstraction

Op art was a major development of painting in the 1960s that used geometric forms to create optical effects

Related Techniques & approaches

Non-objective art.

Non-objective art defines a type of abstract art that is usually, but not always, geometric and aims to convey a sense of simplicity and purity

Art informel

Art informel is a French term describing a swathe of approaches to abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s which had in common an improvisatory methodology and highly gestural technique

Also known as art informel, art autre translates as 'art of another kind' and was used to describe the dominant trend of abstract art in the 1940s and 1950s characterised by an improvisatory approach and highly gestural technique

Gestural is a term used to describe the application of paint in free sweeping gestures with a brush

In art, automatism refers to creating art without conscious thought, accessing material from the unconscious mind as part of the creative process

Related Groups

Abstraction-création.

Abstraction-Création was an association of abstract artists set up in Paris in 1931 with the aim of promoting abstract art through group exhibitions

American Abstract Artists (AAA)

American Abstract Artists (AAA) is an organisation founded in 1936 to promote the appreciation of abstract art in the United States

De Stijl was a circle of Dutch abstract artists who promoted a style of art based on a strict geometry of horizontals and verticals

Penwith Society of Arts

Penwith Society of Arts is an artists' society formed in 1948 at St Ives, Cornwall, Britain by artists working in an abstract style

Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square)

Cercle et Carré was an artist group formed in Paris in 1929 which strongly supported new developments in abstract art and in particular promoted mystical tendencies within it

Réalités nouvelles

The Salon des Réalités nouvelles (new realities) was an exhibiting society devoted to pure abstract art founded in Paris in 1939

The Seven and Five Society

Formed in London in 1919 The Seven and Five Society was initially a traditional group and can be seen as a British manifestation of the return to order that followed the First World War

Bauhaus was a revolutionary school of art, architecture and design established by Walter Gropius at Weimar in Germany in 1919

Abstract Art at Tate

A view from são paulo: abstraction and society.

Explore how geometric abstraction fabricated dreams of a new society in the twentieth century 

Be mesmerised by the kaleidoscopic paintings of the international female artist, Fahrelnissa Zeid

Albers and Moholy-Nagy: from the Bauhaus to the New World

Albers and Moholy-Nagy: from the Bauhaus to the New World pas exhibition at Tate Modern

Malevich exhibition at Tate Modern, opens 16 July 2014

Mondrian and his Studios

Mondrian and his Studios, is a new exhibition opening 6 June at Tate Liverpool exploring the artist's relationship with architecture and urbanism

Rothko at Tate Modern 26 September 2008 – 1 February 2009

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What is Abstract Art? Definition & Examples

Abstract art is a non-objective art form that breaks traditional, realistic art styles. It intends to inspire emotion and intangible experience, rather than telling a story or portraying realistic subjects.

While it exists today in many forms, both two and three-dimensionally, abstract art disrupted the art world when it abandoned realistic representation of subject matter. We’ll explore the characteristics, styles, and examples of abstract art that still influence artists today.

Characteristics of Abstract Art

The main characteristics of abstract art include the following:

• Strong valuation of colors, shapes, lines, and textures
• No recognizable objects
• Non-representational
• The opposite of figurative, realistic, or Renaissance style
• Freedom of form and interpretation

The Purpose of Abstract Art

Abstract art’s main purpose is to spark the imagination and invoke a personal emotional experience. The best abstract art can create a different experience depending on one’s personality or mood.

Abstract art is about the balance or unbalance of form, line, composition, and color to achieve harmony, or disarray. Some pieces may be focused on the method in which the piece is made and which materials are involved. Others focus on the movement of the paint across the canvas or panel. 

Do you enjoy contemporary art that evokes emotion and strong themes?  View  our current exhibitions of prominent Southern California artists.

Types of Abstract Art

Abstract art can be broken down into smaller categories based on several factors, including medium and technique. However, the most common types of abstract art include the following:

• Expressive abstraction: For this type, the painter uses their intuition and expressive brushstrokes to create abstract paintings. Willem De Kooning’s works are representative of this style. The artist’s physical body movement while creating the work may be seen in their marks on the artwork. 
• Action painting/gestural abstraction: Gestural abstraction is a subcategory of expressive abstraction popularized by artists including Jackson Pollock. The artist uses spontaneous movements, making this artwork dynamic and highly expressive. The artist’s physical body movements are the main contributor of the marks on the work.
• Minimalism abstraction: Minimal abstraction takes inspiration from other styles and techniques, including minimalism art, color field and hard edge painting, and abstract expressionism. This leads to artwork characterized by simplicity and pure abstraction, such as the works of Agnes Martin and Donald Judd.
• Conceptual abstraction: This type of art comes from ideas and is therefore not limited by the restraints of representing the physical world.
• Hard-edge painting: Hard-edge painting is characterized by clean, often straight, edges separating the colors. Notable artists that utilize this style include Josef Albers, Piet Mondrain, and Carmen Herrera.
• Optical abstraction: Optical abstraction is a sub-type of hard-edge painting that produces optical illusions. These pieces create depth on a two-dimensional surface. Notable artists for this style include Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, and Richard Anuszkiewicz.
• Geometric abstraction: This is also a subcategory of hard-edge paintings that uses geometric figures in the composition. Josef Albers and Winfred Gaul are well-known artists.
• Color field painting: Color field painting can be categorized by large areas of color, usually with minimal details, though with lots of depth. Often, these pieces are created on large-scale canvases. Mark Rothko is a well-known pioneer.

History of Abstract Art

Non-representational and pattern focused art has existed across time and cultures. However, the first modern artist to create artwork with non-representational forms was Wassily Kandinsky who in 1910 broke away from the traditions of figurative art to produce his first untitled abstract watercolor. He was inspired by a Monet painting of haystacks, where he realized that color and form could be powerful on their own and the object of the painting did not need to be clear or even present.

Although some argue that Hilma af Klint may have produced the first abstract piece in 1906, her work wasn’t seen by the public until much later. Regardless, Kandinsky introduced abstract art to the mainstream art world when he published “ Concerning the Spiritual in Art ” in 1912, creating a theoretical basis for abstract art.

In the early 20th century, other artists began experimenting and introducing different types and forms of abstract art. Piet Mondrian introduced geometric elements in the 1920s, and Jackson Pollock pioneered drip or action painting in the 1940s and1950s to provoke strong emotions.

After World War II, abstract art grew in popularity because it gave artists a way to express how they were feeling in a post-war era that conjured the horrors of war and the anxiety of an uncertain future.

What is Abstract Expressionism?

In New York City during the 1940s, the abstract expressionism movement gained international recognition. It was the first American art style to have international influence for its heavy surrealism, energy, lawlessness, and intensity. It is defined by artists like:

• Mark Rothko
• Willem de Kooning
• Jackson Pollock
• Matthew Dibble

As of writing, Willem de Kooning’s Interchange  abstract landscape is the second most expensive painting that has ever been sold. A Chicago hedge fund manager bought the abstract piece for $300 million in 2015. Interchange was considered worth this value because of its unique story and list of previous owners comprising fascinating people from modern American history.

How Has Abstract Art Evolved?

Since its early beginnings, abstract art has influenced other movements and art styles like conceptual and minimalist art. And it continues to influence artists as they experiment with form, color, texture, and lines to spark emotion and feeling rather than reality.

Do you enjoy abstract and modern art? View available Abstract artwork at Sparks Gallery.  

Notable Examples of Abstract Art

While there are countless popular and famous abstract artworks, we’ll spotlight a few that have influenced the art form and inspired movements. These poignant examples of abstract art continue to inspire:

Wassily Kandinsky’s Untitled

Untitled  is the first abstract painting where Kandinsky freed his artwork from subject matter and form. He used color to convey emotion and feeling. It was this piece that launched abstract art onto the world stage.

Related Link:  Daniel Ketelhut, “Figmented Reality”

Piet Mondrian’s Tableau

Piet Mondrian’s most famous abstract piece,  Tableau , introduced the geometric style as a form of abstraction. He utilized mathematical precision, which was counter to the freeform nature of abstract art.

Jackson Pollock’s Full Fathom Five

One of New York’s abstract expressionists, Jackson Pollock, created  Full Fathom Five  using energetic colors and a new technique to illustrate the exploration of the subconscious. This piece also introduced texture into abstract art.

Helen Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea

Helen Frankenthaler created Mountains and Sea during the 1950s using a new technique of pouring paint thinned with turpentine right onto the canvas. The paint would soak through the canvas adding a new organic texture to her art. Because the paint was poured, the colors weren’t constrained by lines or shapes, creating a new Color Field Painting movement.

Abstract Art Remains Popular Today

Today, abstract art takes many forms, styles, textures, and materials as artists continue to push the boundaries of expression through non-objective forms. Abstract art continues to inspire, connect, and appeal to art lovers. Many appreciate its ability to evoke emotion through color and shapes.

Related Link: Installation: “Inverse” by Sage Serrano

Sparks Gallery celebrates the contemporary artwork of innovative Southern California artists. Our gallery hosts powerful abstract pieces with unique points of view.

Home — Essay Samples — Arts & Culture — Abstract Art — Analysis of the Impact and Influence of Abstract Art

Analysis of The Impact and Influence of Abstract Art

• Categories: Abstract Art

About this sample

Words: 811 |

Published: Jan 15, 2019

Words: 811 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Table of contents

Origins and evolution of abstract art, influence on art and culture, works cited:.

• Beilby, J. (Ed.). (2014). Thinking about Christian apologetics: What it is and why we do it. IVP Academic.
• Holy Bible: New Living Translation. (2004). Tyndale House Publishers.
• Holy Bible: King James Version. (2004). Thomas Nelson Publishers.
• Lints, R. (2018). The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.
• Moreland, J. P., & Craig, W. L. (2003). Philosophical foundations for a Christian worldview. InterVarsity Press.
• Naselli, A. D. (2017). Conscience: What It Is, How to Train It, and Loving Those Who Differ. Crossway.
• Osmer, R. R. (2008). Practical theology: An introduction. Eerdmans Publishing.
• Phillips, R. D. (2013). The worldview of Paul the Apostle. Cambridge University Press.
• Smith, J. K. A. (2014). How (not) to be secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.
• Yonker, D. J. (2019). Theology in Context: A Case Study in the Philippines. Wipf and Stock Publishers.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

• Geometric Abstraction

Mechanical Elements

Fernand Léger

Standing Figure

Jean Hélion

Second Theme

Burgoyne Diller

Relational Painting Number 64

Fritz Glarner

Homage to the Square: With Rays

Josef Albers

Homage to the Square: Soft Spoken

Large Blue Horizontal

Ilya Bolotowsky

Magdalena Dabrowski Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

The pictorial language of geometric abstraction, based on the use of simple geometric forms placed in nonillusionistic space and combined into nonobjective compositions, evolved as the logical conclusion of the Cubist destruction and reformulation of the established conventions of form and space. Initiated by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in 1907–8, Cubism subverted the traditional depiction relying upon the imitation of forms of the surrounding visual world in the illusionistic—post-Renaissance—perspectival space. The Analytic Cubist phase, which reached its peak in mid-1910, made available to artists the planarity of overlapping frontal surfaces held together by a linear grid. The next phase—Synthetic Cubism, 1912–14—introduced the flatly painted synthesized shapes, abstract space, and “constructional” elements of the composition. These three aspects became the fundamental characteristics of abstract geometric art. The freedom of experimentation with different materials and spatial relationships between various compositional parts, which evolved from the Cubist practice of collage and papiers collés (1912), also emphasized the flatness of the picture surface—as the carrier of applied elements—as well as the physical “reality” of the explored forms and materials. Geometric abstraction, through the Cubist process of purifying art of the vestiges of visual reality, focused on the inherent two-dimensional features of painting.

This process of evolving a purely pictorial reality built of elemental geometric forms assumed different stylistic expressions in various European countries and in Russia. In Holland, the main creator and the most important proponent of geometric abstract language was Piet Mondrian (1872–1944). Along with other members of the De Stijl group—Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), Bart van der Leck (1876–1958), and Vilmos Huszár (1884–1960)—Mondrian’s work was intended to convey “absolute reality,” construed as the world of pure geometric forms underlying all existence and related according to the vertical-horizontal principle of straight lines and pure spectral colors. Mondrian’s geometric style, which he termed “Neoplasticism,” developed between 1915 and 1920. In that year, he published his manifesto “Le Néoplasticisme” and for the next two-and-a-half decades continued to work in his characteristic geometric style, expunged of all references to the real world, and posited on the geometric division of the canvas through black vertical and horizontal lines of varied thickness, complemented by blocks of primary colors, particularly blue, red, and yellow. Similar compositional principles underlie the work of the De Stijl artists, who applied them with slight formal modifications to achieve their independent, personal expression.

In Russia, the language of geometric abstraction first appeared in 1915 in the work of the avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) ( Museum of Modern Art , New York), in the style he termed Suprematism. Creating nonobjective compositions of elemental forms floating in white unstructured space, Malevich strove to achieve “the absolute,” the higher spiritual reality that he called the “fourth dimension.” Simultaneously, his compatriot Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) originated a new geometric abstract idiom in an innovative three-dimensional form, which he first dubbed “painterly reliefs” and subsequently “counter-reliefs” (1915–17). These were assemblages of randomly found industrial materials whose geometric form was dictated by their inherent properties, such as wood, metal, or glass. That principle, which Tatlin called “the culture of materials,” spurred the rise of the Russian avant-garde movement Constructivism (1918–21), which explored geometric form in two and three dimensions. The main practitioners of Constructivism included Liubov Popova (1889–1924), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–1956) ( Museum of Modern Art , New York), Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958), and El Lissitzky (1890–1941). It was Lissitzky who became the transmitter of Constructivism to Germany, where its principles were later embodied in the teachings of the Bauhaus . Founded by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, it became during the 1920s (and until its dismantling by the Nazis in 1933) the vital proponent of geometric abstraction and experimental modern architecture. As a teaching institution, the Bauhaus encompassed different disciplines: painting, graphic arts, stage design, theater, and architecture. The art faculty was recruited from among the most distinguished painters of the time: Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee , Johannes Itten, Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, all of whom were devoted to the ideal of the purity of geometric form as the most appropriate expression of the modernist canon.

In France, during the 1920s, geometric abstraction manifested itself as the underlying principle of the Art Deco style, which propagated broad use of geometric form for ornamental purposes in the decorative and applied arts as well as in architecture. In the 1930s, Paris became the center of a geometric abstraction that arose out of its Synthetic Cubist sources and focused around the group Cercle et Carré (1930), and later Abstraction-Création (1932). With the outbreak of World War II, the focus of geometric abstraction shifted to New York, where the tradition was continued by the American Abstract Artists group (formed in 1937), including Burgoyne Diller and Ilya Bolotowsky. With the arrival of the Europeans Josef Albers (1933) and Piet Mondrian (1940), and such major events as the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), organized by the Museum of Modern Art, and the creation of the Museum of Non-Objective Art (1939, now the Guggenheim), the geometric tradition acquired a new resonance, but it was essentially past its creative phase. Its influences, however, reached younger generations of artists, most directly affecting the Minimalist art of the 1960s, which used pure geometric form, stripped to its austere essentials, as the primary language of expression. Artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Dorothea Rockburne studied the geometric tradition and transformed it into their own artistic vocabulary.

Dabrowski, Magdalena. “Geometric Abstraction.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/geab/hd_geab.htm (October 2004)

Additional Essays by Magdalena Dabrowski

• Dabrowski, Magdalena. “ Henri Matisse (1869–1954) .” (October 2004)

Related Essays

• Abstract Expressionism
• African Influences in Modern Art
• Fernand Léger (1881–1955)
• Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
• Paul Klee (1879–1940)
• Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and American Photography
• Anselm Kiefer (born 1945)
• Art and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Turkey
• The Bauhaus, 1919–1933
• Conceptual Art and Photography
• Design, 1900–1925
• Design, 1925–50
• Egyptian Modern Art
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• Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986)
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List of Rulers

• Presidents of the United States of America
• Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, 1900 A.D.–present
• France, 1900 A.D.–present
• Low Countries, 1900 A.D.–present
• The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.–present
• 20th Century A.D.
• Abstract Art
• American Art
• Central Europe
• Color Field
• Concrete Art
• Eastern Europe
• Modern and Contemporary Art
• Oil on Canvas
• Russian Avant-Garde
• Scandinavia
• United States

Artist or Maker

• Albers, Josef
• Atget, Eugène
• Bolotowsky, Ilya
• Booth, Peter
• Braque, Georges
• Diller, Burgoyne
• Glarner, Fritz
• Gropius, Walter
• Hélion, Jean
• Kandinsky, Vasily
• Léger, Fernand
• Moholy-Nagy, László
• Mondrian, Piet
• Picasso, Pablo
• Rodchenko, Alexander

Abstract Art Essay Example

When most people criticize abstract art they are usually criticizing non-representational abstraction. Or, in other words, abstract art that doesn’t represent something you could see in real life. One criticism of abstract art is that it's often seen as random. Abstract art's nonrepresentational nature and inherent lack of symbolism allow for a wider range of potential meaning.  If you take a painting with a cross in it, you are immediately associating that with religion or faith somehow. It’s hard to interpret it as, “oh this represents the taste of mint ice cream on a hot summer day.” This is related to another criticism of abstract art: you could apply any meaning to it; imagine a famous art critic approaching a non-objective abstract piece coming up with some grand, intricate meaning behind the artwork. Examining the colors, the brushstrokes, the thickness of the paint. Only for the artist to say, “Yes, that’s exactly it! I definitely meant that, so much meaning behind this purposeful piece of art.”

This is what it comes down to, purpose. The value of abstract art is equal to the intention and purpose of its creation. If it wasn’t then would’ve every artist’s pallet be valuable abstract art? If you didn’t clean your pallet through the process of a painting then that pallet is an abstract representation of your painting. 

But it’s not, is it? Because you didn’t intend it to be, sure your brushstrokes, the colors you used, and the relationships between them are all there. But the placement of each stroke is completely arbitrary. And so is the painting, because it’s a dirty pallet. 

A misconception is that abstract art is like the dirty artist’s pallet. Created through chance, without purpose, without intent. The superficiality of abstract art created by chance doesn’t go beyond the potential for aestheticism. Yet, abstraction is a spectrum, and you can use it as a tool to create interest in your paintings.

This portrait for instance is representational, but it has abstract elements for visual interest. In this way, the aestheticism of abstraction can play an important role in the allure of an artwork.

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Abstract Art In The Early 20th Century Essay

Abstract art emerged in the early 20 th century when artists started creating simplified objections characterized by no or little orientation to the real world. However, traditional cave paintings during ancient times also depicted some elements of abstraction. In this regard, abstract art refers to visual expressions, which do not portray the representation of the visible world’s aspects. It is also known as nonrepresentational or nonobjective art and often comprises largely abstract elements of color, texture, line, form, and tone. Fundamentally, abstract art flourished after World War II as artists tried graphical or sculpture paintings to express their inner feelings or emotions without connecting them to noticeable realities.

The abstract art’s primary aim is to use gestural marks, shapes, forms, and colors to achieve the effects of a visual reality rather than representing its actual depiction. I think artists had the desire to expand the artistic works through creativity, and thus, they had to think of an intellectual way of portraying emotional and sensitive expressionism. As a result, they chose to express themselves using abstract art to share their unique inner feelings with the communities. Arguably, with this imaginative evolution, artists pursued freedom to explore new artworks and assign them unique meanings, which excite their audience. For instance, Wassily Kandinsky is an excellent example of an artist who used abstract art to express his inner emotions. He utilized non-naturistic brushwork and intense colors to exhibit his imagination and internal feelings. I believe Wassily Kandinsky preferred this type of art as an alternative pathway to divine reality.

Abstract art represents a significant transformation of the art industry in the modern world. Instead of depending on visible realities, this kind of art encourages creative imagination to harmonize and unify different forms, colors, tones, and textures to express inner feelings. For example, Wassily Kandinsky used his non-naturistic brushwork and coloring to inspire alternative views on spiritual reality. Therefore, there is a dire need to promote abstract arts because they give artists the freedom to create new artworks and assign them different meanings.

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KANDINSKY AND ABSTRACTION: THE ROLE OF THE HIDDEN IMAGE

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IN AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT published in 1919, Vasily Kandinsky claimed he painted his first abstract work in 1911. 1 However, in his essays written before the First World War, he made no mention of abstract works before the middle of 1913. 2 No wonder then that one of Kandinsky’s biographers, when faced with describing the paintings of the period 1911–1913, wrote in 1924: “One thinks one sees in the works from 1911–1913 vegetables, meteorological forms, remnants of trees, water, fog, but by careful concentration one is able to make these figments of our imagination disappear.” 3 This expression of uneasiness about the seeming presence of images in Kandinsky’s works betrays the conflict many have felt when seeking to establish a clear cut-off date for Kandinsky’s excursion into abstraction. Kandinsky’s remarks of 1919 have been used to support the misconception that the imagery, actually visible in his paintings of 1911 through 1914, does not really exist. This contradiction between what one sees in the paintings and what one frequently reads is partly due to the fact that Kandinsky’s interpretation of abstraction changed between 1913 and 1919. Related AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES ROSENQUIST DEREALIZED EPIC

Until recently, 4 most studies of Kandinsky’s work before the First World War emphasize those paintings which appeared to use only pure form and color, and as a result they ignore the most interesting aspects of Kandinsky’s development during this period: (1) his determination to communicate, (2) his imagery 5 to create an effect that moved more and more toward the subliminal, (3) his fears of abstraction becoming merely decorative, and (4) the influences that shaped his gradual resolution of these somewhat contradictory aims.

Kandinsky’s determination to communicate a messianic vision led him to search for a “spiritual” form freed from representational elements which he considered materialistic. Although he envisioned abstraction as having the most potential for the expression of his antimaterialistic values, he feared that neither artists nor spectators would be able to grasp its “meaning” and would see it as mere decoration. Consequently, he worked with veiled and stripped imagery as a means of developing an abstract style which would not lose its power to communicate its message to the uninitiated.

Reaching the spectator was a major goal for Kandinsky, for he believed that man stood at the threshold of a new spiritual realm and that the arts would, through the stimulation of the senses, lead mankind to this new age. In his major theoretical tract of the period, Concerning the Spiritual in Art , published in 1912, Kandinsky explained that art was “one of the most powerful agents of the spiritual life,” a “complicated but definite movement forward and upward.” 6 He viewed all of his efforts of this period as steps toward achieving this goal. In his autobiography of 1913, for example, he clearly stated that Concerning the Spiritual in Art and the almanac, Der Blaue Reiter , were conceived for the explicit purpose of awakening the “capacity, absolutely necessary in the future, for infinite experiences of the spiritual.” 7 He repeatedly wrote that he wanted his works of art to “klingen,” to sound, so that they would send “vibrations” into the human soul and help to elevate the human spirit. Kandinsky’s wish to use all the means at his disposal to communicate his ideas even led him to experiment with a stage composition during this period. He felt that a stage work incorporating music, poetry, painting, and dance, which he called the “monumental art work,” would have a greater possibility of reaching the minds of his audience since those who were only capable of responding to one of the arts would more easily become involved, 8 or, as Kandinsky would express it, “vibrated.” However, he devoted his major efforts before the First World War to painting, and he ended Concerning the Spiritual with the optimistic statement that the type of painting he envisioned would advance “the reconstruction already begun, of the new spiritual realm . . . the epoch of great spirituality.” 9

Steiner’s prophecies must have seemed a continuation of many of the apocalyptic notions prevalent in the early years of the twentieth century. Many of the French and Russian Symbolists and those in their circle to whom Kandinsky had been exposed since the late nineties, 15 had written of the need for a new spiritual era. For. example, the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev, whom Steiner admired, prophesied before his death in 1903 that the apocalyptic expectations of St. John would soon occur. 16 Moreover, since 1906, Steiner had been friendly with the French Theosophist, Edouard Schuré, whose books, Les grands initiés in particular, were studied by many of the painters and writers associated with French Symbolism. Schuré, in addition, had been involved in the nineties with the theatrical experiments of the Rosicrucian group of Sar Peladan, whom Kandinsky praised in Concerning the Spiritual .

Kandinsky’s contact with Steiner’s Christian Theosophy and his interpretation of the Revelation to John, 17 may be responsible for Kandinsky’s increasing use of religious motifs from 1909 to 1914, 18 at a time when he was also becoming increasingly interested in abstraction. Beginning late in 1909, Kandinsky started to use apocalyptic images in paintings to which he frequently gave clear eschatological titles, 19 such as Horsemen of the Apocalypse , Deluge , All Saints’ Day , Last Judgment , and Resurrection . He used the terms “Last Judgment” and “Resurrection,” or awakening of the dead, interchangeably. These works contain a number of similar motifs such as angels blowing trumpets, figures rising from their graves, cities falling, lightning, which correspond to the description of the day of judgment in the Revelation to John. 20 The number of works with these religious motifs and titles reached its height during 1911. During that year, Steiner was especially active in Munich forming an organization called Johannes-Bau-Verein to support his theatrical productions, and Kandinsky, working in Munich and Murnau, was involved with the collection of material for the almanac, Der Blaue Reiter , which he and Franz Marc were editing, 21 in addition to preparing the manuscript of Concerning the Spiritual for publication. In both works Kandinsky indicated that his concept of the spiritual rested on a new interpretation of Christianity, one not tied to established religion which he felt had abandoned its responsibility. The Christian emphasis, not dominant in Kandinsky’s works before 1909, can easily be seen when one compares the cover of Concerning the Spiritual , with its apocalyptic overtones, to a membership card Kandinsky designed earlier for an artists’ association formed in 1909. In the card for the Neue Künstlervereinigung, a fairy tale ambience and not a religious one, dominates, whereas the cover of Concerning the Spiritual derives from the center of a glass painting of 1911, which takes its title from the Russian words for Resurrection written on the preparatory sketch. The motif on the cover is quite simplified but the outline of a mountain topped by a city with falling towers and a horse and rider can be identified if one compares it to the motif in the center of the glass painting. The Christian overtones evident in Concerning the Spiritual are also apparent on the cover of the Blaue Reiter almanac which, like the essay, was compiled to “awaken the spiritual.” The prophetic mood of religious conversion can be sensed when one analyzes the source from which the cover was derived. This cover, based on a glass painting derived from the Bavarian folk images of St. George and St. Martin, 22 who were associated with the conversion of heathens through their good deeds, reflected the similarity Kandinsky and Marc saw between their goals and those of the early Christians.

At times, Kandinsky’s use of apocalyptic and Christian imagery has been attributed to an interest in 15th-century German Bible illustration and in the Bavarian folk paintings on glass prevalent in Germany before the First World War. Attributing Kandinsky’s choice of motifs to a purely esthetic interest in the formal aspects of such works ignores his overriding messianic outlook and his Russian background. 23 It seems more likely that folk art attracted him as a means of expressing his messianic intent, for he felt folk art was “purer” than western art of the academic tradition. In some way, he equated the artist’s study of folk, primitive, and Gothic art with the Theosophical study of hypnosis and mesmerism, for both groups were seeking knowledge in areas not previously admired by the establishment. That Kandinsky’s primary interest was not in the formalistic aspects of primitive art is reflected in his attempt to obscure the motifs which he borrowed from earlier styles. He felt that a style from another age not transmit his message for it had to be clothed in a form which grew out of his generation’s experience. Believing that each period of culture produced its own art, Kandinsky maintained that if artists were to be effective they should reflect the mood of their day, which he described as one of conflict, contradiction, dissonance, and confusion. But at the same time he felt artists should be able to point to the future with their works. 24 Consequently, Kandinsky could not be satisfied with imagery as clearly defined as that in Resurrection , where the bent tower and clouds of the central motif are derived, for example, from a 15th-century woodcut for the Nuremberg Bible. 25 For the cover of Concerning the Spiritual , Kandinsky hid the central motif from Resurrection to such a degree that the imagery and the theme are barely recognizable. Hiding the imagery, then, was a way in which Kandinsky could create a mood of confusion, and yet also use the image to help lead one out of the initial confusion, thereby suggesting hope for the future. This is the logical basis for the remnants of imagery based on apocalyptic motifs that persisted in Kandinsky’s work even as he moved ever closer to abstraction during this period.

We find that although Kandinsky gave only a few works religious titles after 1911, he still retained motifs, albeit largely hidden, which related to those in his titled religious paintings. In paintings such as Composition V of 1911 or Composition VI of 1913, he indicated in essays that the imagery of trumpets, angels, and boats, were not merely formal solutions but were included because the theme of Composition V had its origin in the Resurrection, or the awakening of the dead, and Composition VI had been suggested by the Biblical flood. 26 In these large oils the imagery is not easily perceived. However, usually one motif, such as the trumpet in Composition V , helps to bring the rest of the imagery into focus. Even those paintings with religious titles after 1911 seem to have no discernible imagery until one finds a key motif. For example, the 1912 glass painting, Last Judgment , begins to come into focus only when one concentrates on the black outlined trumpet in the upper right. When this work is compared to an earlier painting, such as Resurrection of 1911, even more of the nondelineatory lines take on specific forms; the curved black lines in the upper center suddenly come into focus as the outline of a mountain topped by a walled city with falling towers. The themes of most of the paintings from 1912, 1913, and 1914, which had neither title nor written description, can be clarified when the works are compared to earlier paintings.

Although Kandinsky believed that color could have the same emotional intensity as music, could communicate thought, and that line could suggest dancelike motion, he maintained that color and line alone could not be the basis for the development of an abstract style. As he explained in Concerning the Spiritual , artists as well as spectators needed reference points from the external world; otherwise, the use of pure color and independent form would result in “geometric decoration, resembling something like a necktie or a carpet.” 27 In his autobiography of 1913, he wrote of the great demands that an abstract art would make on the spectator. Consequently, he urged artists to lead the spectator into the abstract sphere step by step, balancing abstract forms with barely perceptible signs. He suggested that objects could be transformed into these hidden signs and could become an additional means of causing a vibration. In Concerning the Spiritual , which contains the most extensive discussion of how the object could have an evocative power similar to that of pure color and form, Kandinsky explained that a combination of veiling the object with ambiguous shapes and colors and also stripping the object into a skeletonlike outline, or construction (as he did for the cover motifs) would create a “new possibility of leitmotivs for form composition.” 28 He proclaimed: “It is not obvious (geometrical) constructions that will be richest in possibilities for expression but hidden ones, emerging unnoticed from the canvas and meant definitely for the soul rather than the eye.” 29 Small wonder then that the 1924 biographer might have seen “trees, water, fog” and was genuinely bewildered by Kandinsky’s insistence in 1919 that his first “abstract” work bore a date of 1911. Of course, even in 1919 Kandinsky did not claim that he painted only abstract works in 1911, but many critics nonetheless refused to allow themselves to see imagery in Kandinsky’s paintings after that date. As late as September of 1913, in an essay called “Painting as Pure Art,” Kandinsky continued to emphasize that the first step toward a “pure art” was the “replacement of the corporeal [object] with the construction.” 30

Kandinsky’s concept of the hidden image as a means of achieving this first step has certain-parallels with Steiner’s ideas about how knowledge of the “higher worlds” should be communicated. Since Steiner believed that the uninitiated could not directly experience the “spiritual world” where colors and forms floated in space, he suggested that those who hoped to reach out to the layman must begin with something tangible, with physical matter. Although Steiner stressed that the artist or seer use myth, sagas, similes, and comparisons to begin their instructions, he advised that directions not be too clear. He believed that hidden and ambiguous suggestions would be the most powerful. He felt that if the student had to decipher the message, he would reach a new understanding in the process. In the preface to one of his books, Steiner warned the reader that every page would have to be “worked out” if the reader wished to experience the message of the book. 31 Influenced by Symbolist theories, Steiner believed that the indirect rather than the direct would lead the way to the spiritual world. 32

Although Steiner may have reinforced Kandinsky’s antinaturalist orientation and although his emphasis on the Revelation of John may have offered Kandinsky a myth or saga upon which he could base his message of struggle and redemption, Steiner’s own artistic efforts were rather heavy-handed and did not offer Kandinsky a model for solving the artistic problems he felt. Instead, Kandinsky drew upon the Symbolist esthetic itself, 33 with its emphasis on the suggestive, the mysterious, and the indirect, for a solution to the conflict that grew out of his desire to reduce representational elements in his paintings without having the resulting shapes degenerate into meaningless geometric patterns. The Symbolist theory of language, which emphasized that words could create a strong emotional impact if their literal meanings were disguised, provided Kandinsky with a theoretical basis for hiding and veiling the objects in his paintings. A belief in synesthesia allowed Kandinsky to transfer a theory formulated for poetry and drama to the visual arts; it allowed him to believe that he could give to the visual object the evocative power the Symbolist poets and dramatists gave to words.

Although the Symbolist concept of language found coherent expression in many individuals, the Belgian dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck is the only Symbolist to be discussed at length in the text of Concerning the Spiritual . Not only did Kandinsky cite three of Maeterlinck’s plays and one essay, but he stated that his approach to language held “great possibilities for the future of literature.” 34 Maeterlinck, who was praised by Kandinsky for expressing the transcendental through artistic means, was also highly regarded by Steiner, who described his work as one of the most “distinguished experiences of the modern soul.” 35

Maeterlinck, who had been attentive to the ideas of the French Symbolist poets in addition to the theories of numerous universalist cults such as the Rosicrucians, Theosophists, and Swedenborgians, popular in the nineties in France, 36 emphasized in his writings that a new language and a new type of theater were needed to enable men to experience the transcendental in their daily lives. Kandinsky called Maeterlinck a clairvoyant and a prophet because he felt the dramatist’s use of ambiguity and mystery in his plays and poems reflected the anxieties and turmoil of his age. In Concerning the Spiritual Kandinsky devoted considerable space to an analysis of Maeterlinck’s use of words to manipulate moods “artistically.” Maeterlinck, Kandinsky stressed, removed the external reference from words by constant repetition and by dislocation from the narrative. Kandinsky translated Maeterlinck’s suggestions for the dematerialization of words into his own proposal for the dematerialization of objects, writing: “Just as each spoken word (tree, sky, man) has an inner vibration, so does each represented object.” 37 He proposed to simplify the object to a residual, organic form which would have the same evocative effect as the symbolic word by placing the object in an unusual context, by hiding its external form beneath veils of color, or by stripping it to a construction. Just as the word could be used for its sound in addition to its notational value so did Kandinsky believe that the residual object could be used to reinforce the effect of pure color and pure form. If the object were hidden, that is if the object became indirect, the inner vibration would be stronger.

Painters connected with Maeterlinck and other Symbolists helped to reinforce Kandinsky’s faith in the power of the hidden. He could study the paintings of Denis and Redon, both of whom he admired, 38 and examine how they used color and a loose brushstroke to dematerialize their images. Certainly in the actual development of Kandinsky’s style, these painters, in addition to Matisse, are far more important than any of the Theosophical drawings of “thought forms” which have been suggested as key influences in the evolution of Kandinsky’s abstraction. 39

While Theosophical drawings may not have had much influence on Kandinsky’s stylistic development, Steiner’s messianic program and his insistence on providing keys to the spectator through myth, seems to have led Kandinsky to use images of an apocalyptic nature in his paintings. The Symbolist admiration for the mysterious and the ambiguous, in addition to Steiner’s emphasis on the indirect, most likely moved Kandinsky to the use of barely perceptible images combined with nondelineatory colors and forms as a means of leading the observer into the spiritual realm.

The interaction of Symbolist and Theosophical ideas in Kandinsky’s development before the First World War is particularly evident in his experiments with stage compositions, which incorporated music, dance, painting, and poetry. Although none of his plays were performed and only one, Der gelbe Klang (The Yellow Sound), was published in the Blaue Reiter almanac, 40 the theater seemed to stand next to painting in Kandinsky’s interests. While Kandinsky’s fascination with the possibilities of a “total art work” based on a stage composition may have originally developed from seeing and reading the work of Wagner 41 —the hero of many Symbolist groups—Steiner’s adoption of Wagner’s idea that the theater should be the focus for the creation of a religious art” must have strengthened Kandinsky’s desire to experiment with stage composition. Kandinsky could easily have seen one of the “mystery” dramas of Steiner and Schuré, which Steiner produced in Munich between 1907 and 1913. Indeed, one of Kandinsky’s friends, Emy Dresler, worked on the set designs for these productions. 43 Both Steiner and Schuré used chorus, music, a rudimentary color symbolism, and a ritualized narrative in their theatrical productions.

Interestingly, certain motifs in Kandinsky’s one published stage composition, The Yellow Sound , resemble motifs in Steiner’s and Schuré’s plays. The most striking similarity is the transformation, with the aid of lights, of one of the major characters, a giant, into an enormous cross at the conclusion of Kandinsky’s stage composition. This is very similar to the conclusion of a Schuré play, performed in Munich in 1909, where a cross is placed in the center of a star, the basic Theosophical sign, thereby suggesting the absorption of all wisdom and religions into his Christianized version of Theosophy. And in a Steiner drama of 1911, a character described as a “representative of the spirit” was placed nine feet above the stage with arms extended to suggest a cross. 44

While Kandinsky’s experiments with a “total art work” have numerous sources, all of those who influenced his productions seemed interested to some degree in the religious possibilities of the drama. Maeterlinck is no exception. However, Maeterlinck’s dramas with their abandonment of plot, narrative action, and conventional scenery were undoubtedly the primary inspiration for Kandinsky’s avoidance of linear narrative and scenery, his use of indistinct words, and the erratic, puppetlike movements of the main characters in The Yellow Sound . 45

Moreover, all those who influenced Kandinsky’s experimentation with works combining the various arts were believers in theories of the correspondence of the senses. Such theories were popular at the end of the 19th century not only among the Symbolist groups in France and Russia, but also among psychologists and various occult groups such as the Theosophists. The belief that one means of stimulating the senses could be substituted for another, and that in certain persons the stimulation of one sense would set off the stimulation of all the others, was accepted by Maeterlinck as well as by Steiner and Schuré. Kandinsky, however, unlike many of the Symbolists and Theosophists and even those experimenters among his contemporaries such as Scriabin who related color to music, did not believe that his stage work combining the various arts should depend on parallel or reinforcing stimuli (bright colors supported by loud music). He felt a stronger expression of his ideas could be achieved if the various arts were used contrapuntally. For example, if in The Yellow Sound the colored lights were to be very intense, Kandinsky indicated that the music should subside. For Kandinsky, the repetition of parallel stimuli was in some sense like naturalism, a 19th-century device—it could in no way suggest the conflict and disharmony which he felt were present in the 20th century. In this respect, the Austrian composer, Arnold Schönberg, who wrote an essay for the Blaue Reiter on non-parallelism between text and musical accompaniment, exerted some influence on Kandinsky’s movement away from a simple and harmonious use of parallel correspondence in his works. 46

Kandinsky’s paintings of this period, like his stage composition, are based on the principle of using as many different stimuli as possible to multiply the vibrations emanating from the canvas. Kandinsky often spoke about color as equivalent to music, of line as equivalent to dance, and of objects as equivalent to words. Here we find one more reason why Kandinsky would write that the object must be used in a painting: “To deprive oneself of this possibility of causing a vibration would be reducing one’s arsenal of means of expression.” 47

Even in 1913 when Kandinsky began to feel he was closer to abstraction, the transformation of apocalyptic motifs into hidden constructions are quite evident in his paintings. In Small Pleasures (known also as Little Pleasures ), for example, whose title stands in ironic counterpoint to its contents, the motifs and their arrangement are similar, although much more veiled, to those in the clearly titled religious works of 1911. Although at first glance Small Pleasures may not appear to have Religious signs, close examination of this painting and the glass painting upon which it is based, reveal a general scheme of a mountain, topped by a walled city, in the center of the work, and a boat tossed by stormy waves to one side of the mountain, a scheme which is similar to the arrangement of motifs in the glass painting, Resurrection . Moreover, the three horse and riders clearly outlined in black in the glass painting of Small Pleasures , but simplified to a few incomplete lines veiled by layers of color in the oil, are derived from a glass painting that Kandinsky called Horsemen of the Apocalypse . In both he included only three of the four riders described in the Revelation to John, an interpretation preferred by Steiner.

Despite the apocalyptic motifs, the imagery has been referred to as the “‘small pleasures’ . . . rowing, loving, riding.” 48 This would seem to ignore not only the relationship of the imagery to earlier apocalyptically titled works, but also the relationship of the imagery in the painting to vivid metaphors found in Kandinsky’s essays, particularly in Concerning the Spiritual . Although Kandinsky did not write a specific essay about Small Pleasures , many of his verbal images in Concerning the Spiritual correspond to motifs in the paintings. The central image of the walled city on top of a mountain threatened by dark clouds frequently appears. In one section of Concerning the Spiritual , Kandinsky wrote:

Humanity is living in such a spiritual city, subject to sudden disturbances for which neither architects nor mathematicians have made allowance. In one place lies a great wall fallen down like a house of cards, in another are the ruins of a huge tower which once stretched to the sky. . . . Spots appear on the sun, and the sun grows dark; and what power is left against the dark? 49

In another section, Kandinsky seemed to be describing the purpose of the storm-tossed boat in Small Pleasures when he equated the anxiety and fear of his age as similar to the “nervousness, a sense of insecurity” of those at sea, when “the continent left behind in mist, dark clouds gather, and the winds raise the water into black mountains.” 50 In addition, Kandinsky’s frequent use of light as a metaphor for awareness and knowledge and his feeling that the color blue could express the spiritual suggests that the sun in the upper left of Small Pleasures , which in the first version was painted blue, is meant to represent the higher planes of the spiritual world.

Kandinsky’s use of certain of the motifs, moreover, seems directly related to Steiner’s attempt to put a more positive cast on apocalyptic symbols. In his lecture on the Revelation of John, Steiner stressed, for example, that the fourth horseman, traditionally indicating death, should be eliminated. 51 Indeed, in one of Steiner’s drawings of the apocalypse, the fourth horseman is barely visible. 52 Kandinsky may have been following Steiner’s injunction when he eliminated the fourth horseman from all of his versions, even from those called Horsemen of the Apocalypse . Kandinsky’s choice of the sun motif as a sign of the spiritual may reflect Steiner’s characterization of the sun as the essence of Christianity. Then the three apocalyptic horsemen leaping from the stormy sea toward the sun could be understood as a visual metaphor, not of the pestilence coming on the day of the judgment, but of the struggle to attain the light—enlightenment. Kandinsky often equated the horse and rider to the artist and his talent 53 and stated that the artist was to lead the way to the future. The theme of regeneration emerging from this more positive interpretation of the apocalypse is reflected in Kandinsky’s statement of 1913 that “out of the most effective destruction sounds a living praise, like a hymn to the new creation, which follows the destruction.” 54

While Small Pleasures may indeed reflect Steiner’s messianic views that the next epoch would only emerge after great destruction, little besides the theme and the motifs used to transmit the message can be attributed to Steiner. The means he used to transform the image into a hidden construction reflect other sources. Redon, Denis, and Matisse contributed much to Kandinsky’s use of color and blurred edges to make his imagery ambiguous. And the Symbolist theory of correspondences strengthened his belief in the power of multiple stimuli in the form of residual motifs and layers of colors, related to the themes of the motifs, to reinforce his message. The motifs of storm and turmoil, such as the boat tossed by waves, on the right side of Small Pleasures , are reinforced by the darker colors of the black-brown cloud formation in the upper right. The more optimistic motifs of the sun, the couple, and the three apocalyptic riders on the left side of the painting are supported by warmer and brighter colors. However, the multiple stimuli are not always parallel. The title, for example, is clearly ironic and serves as a disguise for the deeper meaning of the painting which could only be grasped, according to Kandinsky’s intention, after much study and meditation. Although there is some general correspondence of color to motifs, the difference in color between the right and left sides of the painting is not striking. Indeed, at first glance the color division from bright to dark might not even be noticed. Through these devices of ambiguous multiple stimuli based on residual images of an apocalyptic nature overlaid with color, Kandinsky sought to communicate a tension and an uncertainty in his paintings which would express the dissonance of his age in juxtaposition with his hope for a better future.

Kandinsky was not alone in finding the step to abstraction a difficult one to take during this period. One thinks of the “hermetic” paintings of Picasso and Braque in 1911, where the objects are so dissected as to be virtually unrecognizable. But then, their use of more visible objects in paintings of the very next year indicates their resistance to abstraction. Gleizes and Metzinger verbally testified to this dilemma in their short essay on Cubism, stating: “Nevertheless, let us admit that the reminiscence of natural forms cannot be absolutely banished; as yet, at all events. An art cannot be raised all at once to the level of pure effusion.” 55 Although Kandinsky had contact with the various Cubist groups, his hidden object bears little visual relation to the Cubist fragmentation of the object into geometric components. Nonetheless, many of the Cubists, as well as Kandinsky, would use one motif to bring the rest of the painting into focus. 56 In Picasso’s Man with Pipe of 1911, for example, once we fixate on the pipe, easily identified by the white color in the upper center, the simplified and fragmented forms of the man come into focus. Picasso’s signs don’t have the messianic implications of Kandinsky’s, yet the efforts of both artists were frequently viewed in a similar context before the First World War. Their movement away from representationalism was considered so radical at that time that both men were called “Expressionists.” By 1914, they were clearly moving in different directions and while Picasso’s signs became more readable, Kandinsky’s became almost incomprehensible.

By the end of 1913 Kandinsky had grown increasingly discouraged that his art could reach the uninitiated. The constant criticism of his paintings as meaningless and decorative had taken its toll. In 1914 Kandinsky began to make notations for changes in Concerning the Spiritual which indicated that he felt a few artists could venture into the sphere of abstraction. Even though the process for most of his works of late 1913 and 1914 was the same as the past several years, in some paintings the hidden images became so thoroughly veiled or stripped as to be virtually unrecognizable. Unlike Small Pleasures , where even without studies some sort of imagery can be recognized, a few paintings such as Light Picture appear to have dispensed with apocalyptic imagery and to have substituted what Kandinsky would later call a sensation of the cosmos or infinity. At this point, the outbreak of World War I separated him from his friends and sources in Germany. When Kandinsky finally returned to Germany in 1921 after a lengthy stay in his native Russia, his solutions to the problems of abstraction had been radically altered.

Rose-Carol Washton Long is on the faculty of Queens College, City University of New York. This article is an adaptation of material from her forthcoming book on Kandinsky to be published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford .

An exhibition of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Kandinsky collection will take place from May 12th through September 5th.

—————————

1. V. Kandinsky, “W. Kandinsky: Selbstcharakteristik,” Das Kunstblatt , III, 6, 1919, p. 173.

2. Kandinsky began to state in his essays of 1913 that he had made a major step in the creation of abstract forms. In his autobiography, “Rückblicke,” first published in the catalogue, Kandinsky, 1909–1913 , Berlin, 1913, he described those paintings as closest to abstraction where the forms grew “out of the artist” rather than Originating from nature, a separation which he felt he was just beginning to achieve in that year. See p. xxv. Also see his lecture read at the gallery, Kreis der Kunst, in Cologne on January 30, 1914, in J. Eichner, Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter , Munich, 1957, pp. 109–116.

3. W. Grohmann, “Wassily Kandinsky,” Der Cicerone , XVI, 9, 1924, p. 895.

4. See K. Lindsay’s review of W. Grohmann’s monograph on Kandinsky in The Art Bulletin , XLI, 4, 1959, p. 350, which challenged the accuracy of the 1910 date for the work called the “first abstract watercolor.” See also L. Eitner, “Kandinsky in Munich,” The Burlington Magazine , XCIX, 651, 1957, pp. 192–197, and D. Robins, “Vasily Kandinsky: Abstraction and Image,” The Art Journal , XXII, 3, 1963, pp. 145–147.

5. K. Brisch in his unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, “Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), Untersuchungen zur Entstehung der gegenstandslosen Malerei an seinem Werk von 1900–1921,” University of Bonn, 1955, was the first scholar to explore the apocalyptic motifs in Kandinsky’s pre-World War I paintings. See also H. K. Röthel, “Kandinsky: Improvisation Klamm, vorstuffen einer Deulung,” Eberhard Hanfstaengl zum 75 . Geburtstag , Munich, 1961, pp. 186–192, where the imagery in a painting of 1914 is identified.

6. Many of the quotations from Concerning the Spiritual in Art are my translations from the German text of 1912, Uber das Geistige in der Kunst , 7th ed. (which follows the 2nd ed. of 1912), Bern-Bümpliz, 1963, p. 26, hereafter cited as U.D.G. The best English translation by F. Golffing, M. Harrison, and F. Ostertag, New York, 1947, is based on additions of 1914 and will be used, hereafter cited as C.T.S. , when the translation does not conflict with the German version.

7. See Kandinsky, “Rückblicke,” p. xxvii or its English translation, “Reminiscences,” Modern Artists on Art , ed. R. Herbert, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1964, p. 42.

8. U.D.G. , pp. 107–108.

9. Ibid., p. 143.

10. Although Theosophy has been connected with Kandinsky’s name since 1912, the relationship has not been taken seriously until recently. See L. D. Ettlinger, Kandinsky’s “At Rest,” London, 1961; S. Ringbom, “Art in ‘the Epoch of the Great Spiritual’, Occult Elements in the Early Theory of Abstract Painting,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , XXIX, 1966, pp. 386–418; L. Sidhare, “Oriental Influences on Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, 1909–1917,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1967; and my unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, listed under my maiden name, R.-C. Washton, “Vasily Kandinsky, 1909–1913: Painting and Theory,” Yale University, 1968.

11. U.D.G. , pp. 42–43.

12. Ibid., p. 43.

13. Ibid., p. 107.

14. Between 1906 and 1914, Steiner devoted the majority of his lecture programs to an elucidation of the Gospels. See J. Hemleben, Rudolf Steiner , Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1963, p. 162. As early as 1902, Steiner revealed his Christian orientation in Das Christentum als mystische Thatsache , Berlin, 1902. Because of increasing differences with the international Theosophical Society, Steiner founded his own group in 1913, which he defined as Anthroposophical.

15. Between 1896–1911, Kandinsky had been exposed to a variety of Symbolist concepts. Although Symbolism reached its height as a literary movement in France in the mid-nineties, its impact was of a longer duration in Germany and Russia. In fact, in Russia, Symbolism continued to be a dominant influence in intellectual circles as late as 1911. Kandinsky was the Munich correspondent for the Russian Symbolist periodical, Apollon , 1909 and 1910.

16. Solov’ev’s vision of the cleansing effect of the Apocalypse is reflected in the works of the Russian Symbolist poets Blok and Belyj, both of whom described in their writings of the era before the First World War, the power of Symbolism to create a religious art, not merely an esthetic. It is noteworthy that Belyj also became interested in Steiner and went in 1914 to stay with Steiner at his Goethenaum in Dornach, Switzerland. Kandinsky mentions neither Solov’ev nor Belyj nor Blok, but his friend Marianne von Werefkin, with whom he spent the summers in Murnau during 1909 and 1910, is reported to have been in contact with a number of the Russian Symbolists. See J. Hahl-Koch, Marianne Werefkin und der russische Symbolismus , Munich, 1967.

17. C. Weiler, who holds the diary of Marianne von Werefkin, reported in his biography of her companion, Jawlensky, that both artists had introduced Kandinsky to the ideas of Steiner, perhaps during the summer of 1909. Weiler stated that Jawlensky had spoken with Steiner and had seen one of his plays. See Alexej Jawlensky , Cologne, 1959, pp. 68, 70–73. According to Weiler, Kandinsky had attended a lecture by Steiner on Goethe’s Faust in Berlin during April of 1908 and had been inspired to illustrate the Ariel scene. See W. Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky , New York, 1958, p. 41. One of Kandinsky’s pupils, Maria Strakosch-Geisler, is reported to have attended a lecture of Steiner’s in Berlin during 1908. See A. Strakosch, Lebenswege mit Rudolf Steiner , Strasbourg, 1947, pp. 22–24.

18. For an analysis of this development see Washton, “Vasily Kandinsky, 1909–1913: Painting and Theory.” In The Sounding Cosmos , Abo, 1970, Ringbom also describes Kandinsky’s interest in apocalyptic motifs, which he had not dealt with in his essay of 1966. However, he sees.this interest primarily as a reflection of the fascination with the apocalypse, widely evident at the turn of the century, especially among the Russian Symbolists.

19. The earliest, Paradise , is listed as the last work of 1909 in the house catalogue Kandinsky kept of his paintings. The first of the paintings called Last Judgment is listed in 1910.

20. All Saints’ Day also refers to another aspect of the judgment day, the gathering of all the saints. While the clearest examples of apocalyptic imagery occur in the small glass paintings of 1910, 1911, and 1912, which were modeled after Bavarian folk paintings on glass, a number of oils also contain these apocalyptic titles and motifs. The arrangement of these motifs became the basis for many of his compositions before the First World War.

21. Kandinsky wrote in a letter of September 1, 1911 to Marc that the almanac had to mention Theosophy “concisely and strongly (if possible statistically).” See Der Blaue Reiter , reprint of the 1912 edition with notes by K. Lankheit, Munich, 1965, p. 261.

22. See E. Rolers, “Wassily Kandinsky und die Gestalt des Blauen Reilers,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen , V, 2, 1963, pp. 201–226; also H. Nishida, “Genèse du cavalier bleu,” XXe Siècle , XXVII, 1966, pp. 18–24.

23. II also ignores the prevalence of Christian references in Kandinsky’s essays and poems. See Klänge , Munich, 1913.

24. C.T.S. , pp. 23, 65–66.

25. It is reproduced in Der Blaue Reiter , Lankheit ed., p. 215. Other elements of this motif such as the walled city and the leaping horse and rider can be traced to Kandinsky’s own works of 1902 and 1903.

26. See Kandinsky, lecture, January 30, 1914, in Eichner, Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter , pp. 114–115.

27. U.D.G. , p. 115.

28. Ibid., p. 78.

29. Ibid., p. 129.

30. Kandinsky, “Malerei als reine Kunst,” Der Sturm , IV, 178/179, 1913, p. 99.

31. R. Steiner, Theosophie , 5th ed., Leipzig, 1910, pp. iv, 79, 116. Kandinsky cited this book in Concerning the Spiritual , p. 32, in addition to mentioning articles by Steiner in the magazine, Lucifer-Gnosis .

32. The Symbolists and various occult groups shared an interest in the mysterious and the hidden. During the eighties and nineties in France many of those who were to be called Symbolists were interested in Rosicrucian and Theosophical groups. See J. Senior, The Way Down and Out: The Occult in Symbolist Literature , Ithaca, 1959; G. Mauner, “The Nature of Nabis Symbolism,” The Art Journal , XXIII, 2, 1963–64, pp. 96–103; R. Pincus-Witten, Les Salons de la Rose+Croix , 1892–1897, London, 1968. Similarly Theosophists such as Schuré and the Rosicrucian Peladan adopted ideas from Wagner and the French Symbolists. See G. Wooley, Richard Wagner et le symbolisme Français , Paris, 1931.

33. Symbolism through its visual branches, the Art Nouveau and the Jugendstil, had a direct effect on the subject matter, style, and medium of Kandinsky’s works from 1900 to 1906.

34. U.D.G. , p. 46.

35. Steiner, “Maeterlinck, der ‘Frei Geist’,” 1899, reprinted in Dr. Rudolf Steiner, Veröffentlichungen aus dem literarischen Frühwerk , XXIV, Dornach, Switzerland, 1958, pp. 22–24.

36. See W. Halls, Maurice Maeterlinck, A Study of his Life and Thought , Oxford, 1960, p. 48.

37. U.D.G. , p. 76.

38. Kandinsky had contact with Denis and other Nabis since 1903 when works by Denis and others were displayed in the 1903 Phalanx exhibition organized by Kandinsky. As late as 1912, D. Burliuk wrote in an article, “Die ‘Wilden’ Russlands,” for the Blaue Reiter that Denis’ opinion was highly regarded. See Lankheit ed., p. 47. Redon contributed an essay for the second exhibition catalogue of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, 1910/11.

39. The importance of these drawings was stressed by Ringbom in “Art in ‘the Epoch of the Great Spiritual’,” p. 405.

40. See Kandinsky, “Der gelbe Klang,” Der Blaue Reiter , Lankheil ed., pp. 210–229, or see the English translation by V. Miesel in Voices of German Expressionism , Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1970, pp. 137–145. The music for this stage composition was written by Thomas von Hartmann, a Russian composer living in Munich who later became a follower of the mystic Gurdijev.

41. See Kandinsky, “Uber Bühnenkomposition,” Der Blaue Reiter , Lankheit ed., pp. 195–200. Kandinsky adopted the Wagnerian term “leitmotiv” to describe his concept of the hidden object.

42. See E. Schuré, Le théâtre de l’âme , Paris, 1900, I, pp. xiii–xiv and Schuré, Les grands initiés , Paris, 1909, pp. 438–439. Steiner was much indebted to Schure’s understanding of Wagner.

43. Emy Dresler was a pupil of Kandinsky who exhibited with the Neue Künstlervereinigung; see Sammlungskatalog I, Der Blaue Reiter , 2nd ed., Munich, 1966, p. 12.

44. See Schuré, “Les enfants de Lucifer,” Le théâtre de l’âme , I, and Steiner, Die Prüfung der Seele , Berlin, 1911.

45. Maeterlinck used marionettes in his one act plays and fairy tale figures as the main characters in his larger works to reinforce his departure from the traditional theater. Kandinsky’s use of a chorus offstage may derive from Peladan’s placement of the chorus in his religious dramas.

46. See Kandinsky, “Uber Bühnenkomposition,” and C.T.S. , p. 35.

47. C.T.S. , p. 50.

48. See H. K. Röthel, Vasily Kandinsky, Paintings on Glass , New York, 1966, no. 19.

49. C.T.S. , p. 31.

50. Ibid., p. 30.

51. Steiner, Die Theosophie on der Hand der Apokalypse , 1908, p. 90; copy of the manuscript of this 1908 lecture is located in the Anthroposophical Society, New York.

52. See Steiner, Die Apokalypse des Johannes , 5th ed., Dornach, 1963, no. 3.

53. See Kandinsky, “Reminiscences,” pp. 32–33.

54. Kandinsky, ,”Notizen— Komposition 6 ,” Kandinsky, 1901–1913 , p. xxxviii.

55. A. Gleizes and J. Metzinger, “Cubism,” in Herbert, p. 7.

56. In The Rise of Cubism , H.-D. Kahnweiler described the Cubist use of signs as a means of stimulating one’s memory image in order to bring the whole object into mind; see H. Aronson’s translation from the 1920 German edition, New York, 1949, pp. 11–13.

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What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Heidegger)

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Ingvild Torsen, What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Heidegger), The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Volume 72, Issue 3, July 2014, Pages 291–302, https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12084

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To understand and begin to answer the question of this article, I compare Heidegger's position to Hegel's, since the two appear structurally similar and Heidegger is explicitly indebted to Hegel's aesthetics. On the basis of this comparison, I argue that abstract art has the potential to play an important role on Heideggerian grounds. I conclude that modernist art should be understood not as a supplement to the project of self realization that characterizes Hegelian freedom but rather as a disruptive event that could potentially challenge the constraining technological mindset that is characteristic of our time.

This article borrows its title from an essay by Robert Pippin, which sets out to articulate the “logic” of Hegel's philosophical history of art in order to answer the question of what abstract art could be, from Hegel's point of view. 1 This article is trying to answer the same question but from the point of view of Heidegger. Pippin's essay is not merely an extension and application of a certain Hegelian logic to a twentieth century phenomenon, but rather part of the larger project of achieving a better understanding of the critical potential of a Hegelian idealism. This is not done for “keeping score,” as Pippin puts it, but in order to rediscover, reawaken, and re narrate that tradition so that we can use it, here in the attempt to understand ourselves and our art. 2 Similarly, I make use of Pippin's Hegel not merely for the sake of comparison—although situating Heidegger's philosophy of art historically, and in relation to Hegel in particular, is important in order to articulate the “logic” of Heidegger's understanding of art—but, more importantly, I hope through this comparison to show that an original and quite sinister understanding of modernism and of the human condition in late modernity follows from attempting to make sense of abstraction in the arts from a Heideggerian point of view. In this article I show, first, that Heidegger (like Pippin's Hegel) has the philosophical resources to give an account of why the visual arts turn to abstraction in the twentieth century; second, and more controversially, that there is space in Heidegger's philosophy for understanding abstraction as a meaningful and potentially important artistic innovation; and, finally, that this is revealing of a theory of modernism and freedom that is radically different from Hegel's.

My article has four sections. In Section I, I introduce abstract art as a problem for Hegel's and Heidegger's respective thinking about art. Section II makes use of four features that Pippin introduces to articulate the logic of Hegel's thought as a contrast in order to bring out the logic intrinsic to Heidegger's treatment of art. Section III uses the analysis in II to make sense of Heidegger's many scattered remarks about abstraction and argues that there is space for a positive account of abstract art on Heideggerian grounds. In Section IV, I fill this theoretical space with some concrete content by offering a brief interpretation of Heidegger's engagement with two modernist artists, Paul Klee and Eduardo Chillida. I conclude that, for Heidegger, like Pippin's Hegel, the question of the meaning of abstract art is ultimately a question in which a lot is at stake, because the answer to the question depends on the understanding and possibility of freedom in late modernity.

When Heidegger reflects explicitly on the situation of art in his day, his starting point is Hegel's lectures on aesthetics. 3 These lectures are, according to Heidegger, “the most comprehensive contemplation on the nature of art” that Western philosophy has produced. Heidegger quotes three sentences from Hegel's introduction to the lectures that are central to the claims about the end of art. 4 A century after Hegel gave his lectures in Berlin, during the height of modernism, Heidegger claims the question remains: “Is art still an essential and necessary manner in which decisive truth happens for our historical Dasein, or is art not this anymore?” he asks (this is Heidegger's gloss on Hegel's so called end of art thesis), and claims a verdict on the validity of Hegel's thesis is yet to be reached. 5 At stake is, in other words, the very historical possibility of art as an important phenomenon for our being.

The difficulty of thinking about the abstract artwork from the point of view of either of these philosophers is caused by three shared aspects of Heidegger's and Hegel's accounts: both have a complicated historical account of what art is; neither of them have a general theory about aesthetic experience; both of them claim, in various ways, that art is “over” in their time. It is hence not obvious how abstract art could be understood, if at all, from within their respective philosophies. 6 The first of these forces us to think beyond the two philosophers’ own writing in order to figure out the correct historical understanding of abstract art (in the case of Hegel, we need to entertain a counterfactual, as it were; in the case of Heidegger, we have some textual support, since he on occasion comments on abstract art, but as I show, these can only be made sense of on the background of an interpretation of Heidegger's overall understanding of art in modernity). The second aspect rules out the possibility of inferring something about abstraction by applying a general analysis of the subject's experience of art or beauty (as one could, for example, in Kant) to this art form. The third aspect might suggest that the very possibility of thinking about abstract art is ruled out by both thinkers. I suggest that this last aspect, the end of art, must be understood as internal to the first, the historical account, and that it indeed throws light both on the historical account and also on why a general account of aesthetic experience is unhelpful. The end of art reveals that for both thinkers, art is a human practice that involves the possibility of change so radical that the distance between the previous practice and the current practice is so great that the former can be said to constitute a tradition that has ended.

Pippin points out that not being “the highest manner in which truth acquires existence for us”—which is how Heidegger glosses Hegel's description of the end of art—could still mean that art ranks pretty high. 7 Pippin not only downplays the negative aspect of the end of art thesis but also shows how it can play a positive role in a Hegelian history of art, allowing for the development of modernist art into abstraction. Like thought, art achieves “greater abstraction in means of representation” and “greater reflexivity in aesthetic themes” in the era after the end of art. 8 Instead of closing down options for thinking philosophically about art, Hegel actually opens up a theoretical space for thinking about the later developments of modernist art. 9 From a Hegelian point of view, abstract art is “a kind of enactment of the modernist take on normativity since Kant: self legislation .” 10 Given that Heidegger to a great extent takes over Hegel's narrative of art, and the proclamation of an end point in particular, I pursue a similar reading and show that Heidegger too can be said to have space for a positive understanding of abstract art. I argue that what ends for Heidegger is a certain tradition—the tradition of art within the era of metaphysics—that leaves space for the possibility of what we may deem “post aesthetic art.” 11 What this art reveals is, however, not self legislation but at best a glimpse of a manner of being in which Dasein is not wholly given over to the domineering and constraining mindset of technology.

Pippin goes through four peculiar features of Hegel's theory in order to develop his Hegelian view on abstraction. I summarize these four, with an eye to what is salient for our comparison, and try to situate Heidegger in relation to them as I go along.

II.A. Truth

In the introduction to his lectures on art, Hegel says art is “one way of bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine.” This, Pippin argues, is not necessarily a claim about art's religious function but, rather, about truth: “art is regularly treated as the attempt by spirit to externalize its self understanding in a sensible form, and thereby to appropriate such externality as its own, to be at home therein.” 12 Hegel's focus on meaning and truth in art is what makes Pippin characterize it as “cognitive,” as focused on content, in contrast to, for example, Kant's emphasis on the purely aesthetic dimension. 13

Hegel's emphasis on the expression of the divine or truth is a way of understanding art that has clear parallels in Heidegger's essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Here art is said to “make truth happen,” on Heidegger's rather idiosyncratic use of truth. 14 He describes how the artwork “opens up a world and sets forth the earth,” which means that the artwork is an event that functions as a first concrete manifestation of a certain historical being for a group of people and as a standard around which everything, including human Dasein itself, gets its shape, size, meaning, and ground. 15 The artwork is a sensible, external expression of identity, one could say. For both Heidegger and Hegel, the paradigmatic example of such an expression of the Divine or happening of truth is the Ancient Greek artwork (these works are examples of great art; see the last feature below). They both describe the Greek artwork as capturing and manifesting a whole way of life. 16 For Hegel this amounts to Spirit realizing itself as external in the Ideal; for Heidegger it means that truth is set into work (quite literally). In Hegel, this feature makes possible treating art as a means to self education. In the artwork we have our own self understanding accessible for examination and reflection. In Heidegger, it is clear that the truth of art is an event that shapes us, primarily in a practical manner—it is lived by the people of the world of the artwork—but, given the absence of a Hegelian teleology, it might not be fitting to call this education. 17 The controversial point, with respect to interpreting both Heidegger and Hegel, is to think that abstract art can also be such an occasion of truth. How can abstract art be said to be an event that reveals something about us in the sense that Hegel and Heidegger are interested in? The following features attempt to give more content to such a claim. What is certain, given the shared commitment to truth, is that extending the scope of Hegel's and Heidegger's theories to cover abstraction will rule out interpreting abstract art as being primarily about its own formal features. 18

II.B. Nature

The second feature Pippin notes is that the beauty of nature is insignificant for Hegel's account of art, which distinguishes him from Kant and from his romantic predecessors. This is because nature is “simply ‘spiritless,’ geistlos , or without meaning, even boring.” 19 There are two important dimensions to Pippin's interpretation of this point: first, Hegel rules out both representation and beauty as defining characteristics of art, because what we see when we look at art, even in a landscape painting, is not “an actual spatial natural existent, but becomes a reflection of Spirit.” 20 Second, the exclusion of nature from the understanding of art also rules out that art has an “other.” Instead, when nature becomes art, it takes on a meaning, it expresses what it is “within and for a human community.” The indifference toward natural beauty together with the first feature's insistence on content and truth allow for an art that is both non representational and, possibly, not beautiful at all.

Similarly, natural beauty is not a topic for Heidegger, and neither beauty nor nature is opposed to, or outside of, Dasein's world. When Heidegger discusses Hegel and the end of art in the afterword to “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he claims that beauty is not something that exists alongside truth as an independent property of artworks. Beauty is rather something that comes to shine only when truth is set to work. Heidegger is fairly explicit in his dismissal of representation as significant for art—art is not “depiction of reality,” or “reproduction of the general essence of things”—and hence neither representing nature nor anything else is intrinsic to art. 21 As in Hegel, there is clearly logical space for nonrepresentational art.

There is, however, one feature of the art essay that complicates this parallel. Heidegger describes the truth of a work of art as opening up world and setting forth earth. Earth is a feature of the event of the artwork that is not accessible to human meaningfulness, except as “present in its absence,” as Heidegger puts it. It can be understood as pointing to both materiality, ground, and more literally earth as in nature. Hence, it might sound as if nature as other is present in Heidegger's thought in a way that it is not in Hegel. However, it is important to note that the concept ‘earth’ only occurs in tandem with world, and meaning in art happens through capturing the tension between the two features. Earth is a dimension of what is, which resists human understanding, but which still should not be thought along a nature–spirit dichotomy. Heidegger's Being and Hegel's Spirit can be thought of as similar in the sense that negativity, otherness, or nothingness is contained within them. Still, this feature brings out a contrast with Hegel and is eventually going to reappear as helpful for making sense of some of Heidegger's comments occasioned by the abstract sculptures of Chillida (Section IV).

II.C. History

The third feature Pippin discusses is Hegel's insistence that artworks must be understood as “of their time,” which entails that how artworks matter to us depends on their historical situation. It is the situation of art in the nineteenth century that motivates Hegel's claim that art cannot serve as the highest expression of spirit anymore. Pippin writes that a main reason for this is that Hegel's contemporary world is “a prosaic , unheroic world, not much of a subject for the divinizing or at least idealizing transformation of aesthetic portrayal at all.” 22 Just as nature is disenchanted, so is the social world, leaving little worthy of artistic representation. Or to quote from the Aesthetics : “Spirit only occupies itself with objects as long as there is something secret, not revealed in them . . . [but now] everything is revealed and nothing obscure.” 23 In such a time, there really is not much about the world that we would need art in order to understand.

Also this moment has a clear parallel in Heidegger; the particular meaning of any event of truth is indexed to the contemporary historical situation. But Heidegger has a very different understanding of his contemporary situation. Both Hegel and Heidegger see their respective eras as leaving Dasein without any mysterious objects, enchanted nature, or awe inspiring “other,” but in Heidegger's case this is due to a more sinister situation. A century after Hegel, Heidegger understands his present as characterized by nihilism and technology. 24 Technology is primarily a way of being and thinking, according to Heidegger. It is a paradigm for understanding what is that has the total ability to frame our experience—it allows us to make sense of everything, including art, as resource or standing reserve (this frame is what Heidegger calls the Gestell ). The totalizing character of technology is the reason why Heidegger repeatedly questions not just how but whether art can matter to us at all. What passes for art at this point in history is mostly kitsch, according to Heidegger, things that serve as “experience generators” [ Erlebnis Erregerer ] for consuming subjects. 25 The only object of art is the fleeting, subjective experiences of the audience.

As in the case of Hegel (but for very different reasons), the current historical situation gives us reasons to think that art would have to turn away from objects, that is, from representationalism, if it were to find something to be about that was not already obvious. Hence, abstract art might not merely be possible but timely on Heideggerian grounds. I will suggest that one way to understand abstract art is as countering the contemporary tendency toward mastery and consumption that is characteristic of technology.

II.D. The Impossibility of Contemporary Great Art

Finally, Pippin turns to the reason why Hegel is opposed to those of his contemporaries who hoped for a renewed great art (such aspirations as held by, for example, Schelling and the romantics) and instead claims that art of the world historically transformative kind has become a thing of the past. 26 “Great art” here means monumental, culturally important, transformative art. One reason for why Hegel does not think the art of the future would play this role is due to “a great alteration in the way things basically make sense to us, and a large component of that ‘basically’ involves an altered relation to our own sensibility,” Pippin writes. 27 This change in the role of sensibility in our lives is apparent in the visual arts, in which abstract art represents a turn toward self legislation, on Pippin's view. The content of human life and experience is increasingly understood as being provided by us, not given to us by nature or a world external to our own interpretive practices. From a Hegelian point of view, abstract art should be seen as participating in this project of self determination, which means Pippin recommends interpreting modernist art as “self conscious, conceptual, not, as with Greenberg, reductionist and materialist.” 28

Heidegger also has a notion of great art that appears incompatible with the historical conditions of late modernity, and this is the context for bringing up Hegel's end of art thesis in the afterword to the art essay. 29 In the next section of the article, I argue that the impossibility of great art does not leave Heidegger a nostalgic or conservative, but on the contrary that it is precisely realizing the impossibility of great art that allows him to appreciate the quite radical, new nature of modernist art and abstraction in particular. 30

Heidegger and Hegel share the view that understanding art is a matter of understanding history, which for both of them is a philosophical history; that in order to understand contemporary possibilities of art, one needs to view art's situation in light of its history and the meaning this history expresses; and that given a certain history of art, art has outplayed its role. Hence, there are clear parallels in the diagnostic view. However, Heidegger seems far less optimistic than Pippin about the prospects for art “after” the end of art. This difference is due to a very different understanding of the logic or telos motivating the historical development of Western art, and I devote the next section to this difference.

In this section, I spell out the relationship between the four features from above in order to articulate the logic of Heidegger's philosophy of art with respect to the future. Again, a comparison with Pippin's Hegel is helpful to bring out the structural differences between the two thinkers: in the case of Hegel, history   ( C ) is such that in the present moment, Spirit is articulated as (Hegelian) philosophy and the human being no longer understands itself as opposed to an enchanted nature (B), so that the truth (A) of art is more explicitly self reflexive. The result of this constellation is the diminished role of art with respect to world historical change and understanding (D). This new constellation ultimately has consequences for the interpretation of truth ( A ) in modernism—the truth of art after the end of art is such that it demands change in artistic expression: “Representational art cannot adequately express the full subjectivity of experience, the wholly self legislating, self authorizing status of the norms that constitute such subjectivity, or, thus, cannot adequately express who we (now) are.” 31 Pippin ties the different features of Hegel's philosophical history of art together in freedom . This is the telos of Hegel's narrative, and our historical era is devoted to the continuous realization of freedom, on Pippin's interpretation. Within this ongoing project, abstract art becomes a way of reflecting on who one is, a supplement to the project of self realization and self determination that characterizes the project of freedom as it is lived in high modernity. A consequence of this view is that the extended Hegelian narrative Pippin creates ends up in an eternal modernism. 32

This optimism is not shared by Heidegger, who does not view the history of Western philosophy or art as leading up to such realization of spirit and human potential in freedom. Hence, the relationship between the four features reveals a different logic: instead of freedom, Heidegger sees his time as characterized by a powerful, but reductive, technological mindset that is anything but liberating. What history shows is the exhaustion of the Western tradition of philosophy into nihilism and the corresponding technological mindset. Because Heidegger's assessment of the historical situation ( C ) is so different from Hegel's, the impossibility of great art ( D ) follows, but for very different reasons. On Heidegger's account, history leaves art in a situation that makes the first feature of art, that it is an event of truth ( A ) that opens world and sets forth earth, close to impossible because of the pervasiveness of technology. 33 The present technological mindset does not merely rule out understanding nature as the human being's “other” ( B ), but it has the potential to rule out conceiving of any “other” at all, including other ways of being; therein lies both its power and its nihilism. Hence, the historical present is not characterized by truth and self reflection but rather a blindness that hinders self understanding. The impossibility of art in the traditional sense, what was referred to as “great art” above ( D ), coincides with the emergence of abstract art, and the relationship between truth and history can make sense of this development.

The question I want to pursue now is whether there are resources in Heidegger not merely to explain the development of abstraction but also to understand abstract art as a kind of “event of truth” that is still potentially important to its historical Dasein. I first point to some reasons for thinking that Heidegger's view is that any art worthy of the name is ruled out at this point in history and, consequently, that abstract art confirms this assessment and cannot be art on Heideggerian grounds. I then argue that in spite of this, Heidegger recognizes a potential for art and that there are passages in his work that suggest a more hopeful understanding of abstraction and modernism in art more generally. In the final section of the article, I look at Heidegger's engagement with abstract sculpture and painting as exemplifying this alternative view of artistic modernism.

First, there are several reasons one might think Heidegger's assessment of the contemporary situation would rule out that abstract art could have the positive qualities attributed to art above. I point to some passages in which Heidegger seems most negative toward this possibility. In Mindfulness ( Besinnung ), an unpublished work from the late 1930s, in a section entitled “Art in the Age of Completion of Modernity,” Heidegger elaborates on art's difficult situation in this historical era and reflects on its future. 34 His judgment is pretty harsh: Heidegger sees no place for art or potential for development. He claims that the art of his time is “completing its metaphysical nature” and that this shows itself in the disappearance of art works , even though art persists. He claims that it is now impossible to ask for art's meaning behind its creations because the standard for encountering art is the lived experience ( Erlebnis ) felt by the audience. Such a situation rules out that art can occasion truth of the world opening kind that is characteristic of great art.

In the 1955–1956 lecture course published as The Principle of Sufficient Reason ( Der Satz vom Grund ), Heidegger writes of abstract art: “The techno scientific construction of the world launches its own claims on the creation of all beings that force themselves into its light. Therefore, what we imprecisely call ‘abstract art’ has its legitimate function in the realm of the techno scientific construction of the world.” 35 How are we to understand the “legitimate function” attributed to art here? On the one hand, this remark might seem to explicitly contradict my stated goal, since it can be taken to mean that Heidegger understands abstract art to adhere to the abstract, axiomatic language preferred by technology (a contemporary descendant of the principle of sufficient reason) and that Heidegger is accusing abstract art of being in the service of technology. 36 On such a reading, these comments on abstraction might seem to confirm the view that Heidegger has given up on art as truth revealing.

On the other hand, the remark about the legitimate function of abstraction could be understood differently: I want to suggest an alternative interpretation according to which there is a positive or, if you will, subversive role to play for art in the age dominated by technology. The context of the quotation is the question of whether human beings have the ability to respond to technology and whether this would allow for new, free possibilities for human Dasein. And within this context, the “legitimate function” of abstraction could mean that it is a possible way to resist, not conform to, the dominance of technology.

In another passage from The Principle of Sufficient Reason , Heidegger claims the fact that art becomes without object in the present age “testifies to [abstract art's] historical legitimacy, and most of all, if abstract art itself grasps that its creations can no longer be artworks, but something that we still lack an appropriate word for.” 37 That art no longer produces works need not be understood as a negative assessment. Instead, if what art produces is something “we still lack an appropriate word for,” something could be happening in art that we have not yet understood, certainly not from the point of philosophy of art. When he says art has no object, it is tempting to interpret Heidegger as having grasped something characteristic of modernism, that is, its self reflexivity and efforts to be about nothing outside itself, in addition to the breakdown of the traditional genre boundaries that made art works . 38 Such a line of interpretation suggests a different understanding of abstract art and its connection with the contemporary historical situation: given the technological mindset of our time, the historical legitimacy of abstraction may consist precisely in its potential resistance to technology, partly through not being a recognizable object for manipulation at all. 39

In “The Question Concerning Technology” (published in 1954), Heidegger sees more promise in art than in either of the previous texts discussed above, although the historical situation is portrayed as just as grim. 40 Heidegger explicitly suggests that art is the realm in which the technological paradigm is to be challenged . The historical condition is, hence, not seen as ruling out but necessitating a change in what the truth of art can be. This suggests a historical shift in the Heideggerian conception of the truth of art from art as opening up a historically and geographically distinct world or expressing the Divine at the beginning of Western metaphysics to art as having a different role that is primarily challenging a solidified worldview in the post metaphysical, nihilist world of technology. In the former case, truth happens in art in a way that allows the preservers of an artwork to live in its world and inhabit its earth and thereby co constitute an identity. In the 1950s, however, Heidegger describes art's “saving power” as the potential to challenge and make us aware of the Gestell . That truth is not in itself opening a world we can inhabit. Moreover, the event of such a truth would challenge our modern identities in a manner that would require reflection on our part about who we are and want to be. Hence, the truth of abstract art could be understood as participating in and contributing to freedom also on Heidegger's view, although this concept of freedom must be understood against a very different background than the Hegelian modernism drawn up by Pippin. If the truth of modernist art is to make us aware of different possibilities of being and living, or even just imagine that there are alternative ways of understanding our relationship with what is, it is relevant to freedom in the sense of imagining and projecting possibilities for the future beyond the seeming inevitability of the technological mindset.

This historical shift does not mean that Heidegger changed his mind about art in general but rather reflects a development in his understanding of how art itself can be in the contemporary moment, given its historical nature. 41 The comparison with Hegel brings into relief what is going on: initially, Heidegger laments the impossibility of great art for reasons parallel to those offered by Hegel. He then dismisses the contemporary art practice as expressive of the dominance of a technological mindset. But by the time he writes The Principle of Sufficient Reason and “The Question Concerning Technology,” a different possibility for art is considered: art can be the counter to the enframing of being that is dominant in the era of technology. In the course of this development in the understanding of abstract art, we see a different story about modernism take shape in which the need for an art that is challenging, critical, and mindful is more pressing than on Hegel and Pippin's view. Art is not a companion in the constant enactment of self reflection in freedom but rather a counter to the conformity of commodified culture characteristic of late modernity.

The previous section opened up a theoretical space for thinking of abstract art as differing from traditional art both in its meaning and its importance. In this section, I want to show how Heidegger engages particular abstract artworks and how he recognizes them as revealing something of importance for us, albeit not living up to the traditional standard of great art. Even with the ambiguities in his writing noted in the previous section, I take Heidegger's appreciation and interpretation of these artworks to be further support of my claim that abstract art can be given a positive interpretation on Heideggerian grounds.

In the late 1950s, Heidegger discovered the work of Paul Klee. Heidegger saw many different works of Klee—paintings, drawings, and watercolors—and we know he liked “Heilige, aus einem Fenster” and “Ein Tor,” for example, as well as some of Klee's cartoonish drawings. 42 Heidegger was very enthusiastic about the artist and reportedly announced that after encountering this body of work he had to write a “pendant” to the art essay. However, Heidegger never did, and what it is about Klee that spurred him to think he should, as well as what it was he intended to add to his essay, remain unknown. The two most influential commentators on Heidegger's philosophy of art interpret Heidegger's announcement in totally contradictory ways. Otto Pöggeler takes it to mean that Heidegger realizes the shortcomings of “The Origin of the Work of Art” and feels the need to write something new or different about contemporary art. Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann, on the other hand, assumes that what Heidegger wanted to do was write a continuation of the art essay in which he would extend his analysis to cover modernist art. I see no reason to think of a pendant inspired by a modernist artist as having to be either a critique or a defense of a former account. Indeed, given the developmental picture I have presented here, what we probably could expect are reflections on artworks after aesthetics, that is, on art stemming from a very different historical and philosophical context than the art discussed in 1935. 43

With Klee, Heidegger seems to catch a glimpse of a future determination of art. 44 The textual basis for a Heideggerian interpretation of Klee's work is minimal. The material is primarily Heidegger's own comments, quotes, and highlighting of certain passages in Klee's theoretical texts. I hence point to some of the themes that seem to be on Heidegger's mind when working on Klee and relate them to his own texts discussed in Section III.

Klee composed several theoretical texts. Although Heidegger questions whether Klee actually grasps what happens in his own creations, he thinks it makes sense that Klee's painting is accompanied by writing. Precisely because art is changing, Klee has the need to work out theoretically what he sees as the possibilities of art. On Heidegger's story, modernism is not characterized by reflecting on its own essence (for example, what is pure painterliness?) or its own ontology (as modernism is understood by Greenberg or Danto). For Heidegger, the point is rather that reflection is demanded in a period of great change not necessarily in order to define what art is but instead to investigate what art can be. The reflexivity of modernism is, hence, not a Vollendung or the last stop in a narrative on Heidegger's story but rather a sign of transition and searching.

In Heidegger's comments on Klee, the questions of abstraction and work resurface. Heidegger says that “the less representational” Klee's works are, the more they shine forth [ erscheinender ], which suggests that moving away from traditional styles is a good thing. 45 Further, he says that there are no beings, no objects, no eidos in Klee's work. Heidegger's further comments give the impression that Klee is interesting precisely because he is somewhere between representation and abstraction: he challenges notions of object, representation, figure, and even image ( Bild ). Heidegger claims that Klee's work is less like pictures, that is, traditional artworks, than states ( Zustände ). Hence, both what the art is about and how it functions seem to be changing in Klee's work.

Heidegger admires a small watercolor with chalk by Klee, “Heilige, aus einem Fenster,” which shows a face toward an empty background. The work is made up of flat surfaces, colors, and lines and depicts a figure fractured as if seen through a stained glass window. Heidegger claims this little image has a silent mood that “lets us see.” It is a mood which we should think of as “the innocence of the relation to the fourfold” (Heidegger's name for the unity or region that he earlier would have called world). In this context, Heidegger asks if the transformation of art will have space for “works.” Again, instead of understanding “not being a work” as an entirely negative characteristic, it might be a way to capture that the role of the new art is to provide a state, a place, or an occasion to reflect. In late modernism, art no longer opens up a particular world, with the grand historical, cultural, and political implications that come with this event, but art can create a mood and place for reflection on what it is to be a world or site that human Dasein can inhabit in a meaningful way (this inhabiting is usually translated as “dwelling”).

In the technology essay, Heidegger suggests that art could be a realm that challenges technology through its familiarity with and difference from technology. A more concrete way to understand the meaning of this suggestion is offered in “Kunst und Raum,” a text written in the last decade of Heidegger's life. 46 The text is a short piece that Heidegger wrote after having met the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida and is a response to their conversations about the sculptor's work. Chillida is certainly a modernist—his works are mostly abstract, some of them seem to be barely wrested out of stone, and others are large constructions of sculpted iron. Some works give quite organic associations while others recall machines and industrial structures. Some are outdoor sculptures, which (one might say) make earth and sky strikingly visible. 47 Heidegger's appreciation of Chillida's work provides further evidence that he does not simply dismiss all abstract art.

The plastic body embodies something. Does it embody space? Is the plastic a capturing of space, a mastering of space? Does the plastic then contradict the techno scientific conquering of space? . . . Art and scientific technology view and treat space in dissimilar ways. 50

Heidegger's text continues as a meditation on space, trying to get at it in a manner that is not the scientific correlate to the technological mindset (for example, the understanding of spatiality implicit in modern mathematics). Eventually, Heidegger claims sculpture is the embodiment of place(s) [ Ort ]. A place opens up a region and gathers the open around itself. It is quite unlike the abstractly thought pure space of modern physics. A place is where things can linger and human beings live among things. 51 In other words, a place anchors and occasions what Heidegger calls world. Especially if we think of “Wind comb,” one of Chillida's outdoor sculptures, can such a Heideggerian description make sense—the “comb” makes the elemental visible and open space becomes a neighboring region around a place. This is a kind of world opening event, although not in the sense of instantiating a historical epoch that was characteristic of great art. Instead, its truth seems more indirect; it is a reminder of the being of place, earth, and sky as these are overlooked from the perspective of technology.

Some of Chillida's sculptures are also strikingly “earthy.” They are often big and heavy blocks that give an impression of being minimally manipulated. In these sculptures, one sees the happening of figure coming out of the stone, iron, or terra cotta in a way that brings associations to the description of the strife of earth and world in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” These sculptures that border on being “mere material” are, unlike a stone in a quarry, self sufficient and not available to manipulation and hence resist being thought of as “standing reserve,” even if they remind us most of something out of nature, something mute. 52

Finally, toward the end of his short essay on art and space, Heidegger offers a description that is connected to the original four characteristic features outlined in Section II: “The plastic arts: the embodiment of the truth of being in works that bring about their own place.” 53 This shows that forty years after raising the question of the end of art, Heidegger recognizes even modernist, abstract art as being occasions for truth. This short description also suggests that the truth of contemporary sculpture is to open a “smaller” world: sculpture counters enframing by suggesting a very different kind of space: space as place, which is a habitable place that we lose out of sight in technology.

I argued in this article that Heidegger, like Hegel, has a historical understanding of art that entails that what art was and can be is never understood except in relation to history, with its particular configuration of the relationship between truth, human existence, and self understanding. Abstract art is an art form that is made possible by the exhaustion of a certain tradition and which in Heidegger's case gains its positive meaning by challenging the one dimensional, nihilistic rationality characteristic of the completion of that tradition. The two features that present the most distinct differences between Hegel and Heidegger, apart from the obvious difference in mood, are that on Heidegger's account modernist art is characterized by indeterminacy, and it is not clear that philosophy could say much about this art at all. “Only art can determine art (not reflection or planning external to art),” Heidegger writes, “ What and how art can be in the age of enframing? Cannot be determined, cannot be read off somewhere— only : ‘ artistically ’ decided, so that in such art and in it alone lies the answer to itself, within the event.” 54 In this sense, Heidegger's philosophy is more radical when it comes to the art of modernism and beyond: if this art succeeds in breaking with the tradition that was brought to completion with romantic art, it is something new that also escapes the “logic” of any aesthetic theory, and hence its meaning cannot be expressed by philosophy in general terms. Where Pippin's Hegel assigns modernist art a reflective role in the ongoing event of freedom, Heidegger sets art free to pursue the enormous, perhaps impossible task of enabling reflection in a time of technological constraint. 55

Robert Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel),” in The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 279–307; previously published in Critical Inquiry 29 (2002): 1–24. Pippin has since written a monograph on Hegel and modern art which includes a chapter comparing Hegel and Heidegger. The focus of that discussion is slightly different than the comparison here. See Robert Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and Pictorial Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Compare Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity , p. 18.

This happens in the afterword to “The Origin of the Work of Art,” which I will refer to as “the art essay”; Martin Heidegger, Holzwege , in Gesamtausgabe , vol. 5, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994), pp. 7–68 (hereafter, GA 5). Heidegger's afterword is written sometime between the finalization of the essay in 1936 and its first publication in 1950. Thematically, the afterword has much in common with other writings from the late 1930s. For dating of the different parts and versions of Heidegger's essay, compare Karsten Harries, Art Matters (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), and Jacques Taminiaux, “The Origin of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’” in Poetics, Speculation and Judgment: The Shadow of the Work of Art from Kant to Phenomenology (SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 153–169.

“For us, art is no longer the highest manner in which truth acquires existence”; “One can hope that art will continue to advance and become even more complete, but its form has ceased to be the highest need of Spirit”; “In all these respects art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.” G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art , vols. I–II, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford University Press, 1975).

Heidegger, GA 5, p. 68. All translations of Heidegger are my own.

One might think the question is easier to answer in the case of Heidegger, since Heidegger actually lives through modernism, experiences the development of abstraction in visual art, and comments on abstract art on a few occasions. However, since Heidegger is oftentimes very dismissive of his contemporary artworld, he may come across as rather nostalgic, if not outright conservative, viewing great art as something of the past, not unlike how Hegel is often perceived. My errand here is thus parallel to Pippin's in this respect: to counter the impression of conservatism and instead put forth an interpretation of Heidegger as offering a philosophy that has interesting things to say when brought into conversation with modernist art.

Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art?” p. 283n.

Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art?” p. 281.

“[B]y closing the door on the philosophical significance of traditional art, [Hegel] could thereby be understood to have opened a door to, to have begun to conceptualize the necessity of, non image based art” (Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art?” p. 280).

Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art?” p. 304.

The way Heidegger uses some of these terms is idiosyncratic: “metaphysics” is his designation of the whole tradition of Western philosophy since Plato, which he claims is the history of asking the question of what it is to be as a question of beings . “Aesthetics” is the name of the subdiscipline of metaphysics that deals explicitly with questions of art and beauty, but hence also comes to think of these as questions about various kinds of entities encountered by subjects. For an insightful account of modern aesthetics as a case of metaphysics, see Iain D. Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge University Press, 2011), chap. 2.

Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art?” p. 288.

‘Cognitive’ here ought presumably to be taken in a wide sense—the content needs to be recognized and taken up—but presumably this can be done practically, that is, by living a certain life, and need not be consciously articulated in language or reflected upon.

Heidegger uses ‘truth’ to denote the disclosing of what it is that precedes any propositional truth, hence claiming that this is a more originary truth or the precondition for what we usually call ‘truth.’ Such an open region, in which what is can make sense and assertions can be said to be true or false, is importantly historical.

Heidegger, GA 5, pp. 31–39.

This is, of course, summarized to the point of over simplicity. But these are fairly well known and uncontroversial ways of understanding both Hegel's and Heidegger's texts.

Heidegger's history is not one that is organized by a telos , and hence it seems problematic to say that the development of one era into another, with the changing self understanding that goes with historical changes, can be judged normatively as progress or decline. This brings out an important difference between Hegel and Heidegger and the “logic” of the historical nature of human sense making, which has consequences for understanding abstract art. I return to this in Section III.

Hence, their story about abstraction would be different from more formally oriented stories about modernism. Compare Pippin's discussion of Greenberg on p. 289n.

Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art?” p. 289. This relationship with nature is a historical event. In late modernity, even our own nature is a human achievement: “the natural desire to reproduce has become inseparable from romantic values and the norms of familial and social existence.” Mere nature is not available within existence.

Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art?” p. 290.

Heidegger, GA 5, p. 26.

Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art?” p. 295.

Hegel, Aesthetics , p. 604.

Heidegger describes his contemporary situation as the result of the consummation of metaphysics, which is characterized by nihilism and what he first calls machination and later technology. The age of technology is dangerous, as it threatens to finalize metaphysics as complete nihilism, in which no future can be seen for history, in the sense that human Dasein will be so encapsulated in a worldview that we cannot project future possibilities for historical change.

Martin Heidegger, Besinnung , in Gesamtausgabe , vol. 66, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997), pp. 30–40 (hereafter, GA 66), and Nietzsche I (Stuttgart: Neske, 1998), p. 85.

Perhaps the most famous call for such an art in post Kantian philosophy is the System Program. See “The Oldest System Program of German Idealism,” in Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory (SUNY Press, 1988), pp. 154–156.

Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art?” pp. 296–297.

Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art?” p. 305.

In the next section, I spell out exactly why such a notion of great art is incompatible with Heidegger's assessment of his own time, a claim that is less acknowledged in the literature with respect to Heidegger than Hegel.

Part of the reason why a more romantic or nostalgic attitude is sometimes ascribed to Heidegger is his description of Hölderlin's poetry as artwork that can function as “great art” if only the German people would respond to it in the manner it demands. This is a motif that is particularly striking in Heidegger's early readings of Hölderlin. Compare Karsten Harries's description of Heidegger's position on art as representing a choice between Hölderlin and Hegel in Art Matters , pp. 183–196.

Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art?” p. 300.

This attitude is expressed in Pippin's aligning himself with art historian Michael Fried: “I agree with what I take to be Fried's attitude: there was no failure of modernism, no exhaustion by the end of abstract expressionism. . . . The aftermath . . . can better be understood as evasions and regressions rather than alternatives” (Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art?” p. 301, n. 32).

Iain Thomson claims that, according to Heidegger, truth happens with art “on at least three different orders of magnitude: (1) micro paradigms he will later call ‘things thinging,’ which help us become aware of what matters most deeply to us; (2) paradigmatic art works like Van Gogh's painting and Hölderlin's poetry, which disclose how art itself works; and (3) macro paradigmatic ‘great’ works of art like the Greek temple . . . which succeed in fundamentally transforming a historical community's ‘understanding of being’” ( Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity , p. 44). My account stresses that what determines the possible “magnitude” of the truth of art is art's historical condition.

Heidegger, GA 66, p. 30. “Die Zeitalter der Vollendung der Neuzeit” is another of Heidegger's descriptions of the age of the end of metaphysics, the age of technology or machination, the age of nihilism, in other words, of time after Hegel.

Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Stuttgart: Neske, 1997), p. 41.

For example, Julian Young reads Heidegger's comment this way, claiming that Heidegger sees abstract art as failing to break with metaphysics ( Heidegger's Philosophy of Art [Cambridge University Press, 2001], p. 166). Günther Seubold uses stronger language, claiming that Heidegger “has most ardently thrown out [abstract art] and displayed its—even if working without objects—metaphysical nature” ( Kunst als Enteignis [Bonn: Bouvier, 1996], p. 118). I find such interpretations unwarranted.

Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund , p. 66.

In Mindfulness , Heidegger suggests the paintings, plays, poems, and musical pieces of the time are not works in the strict sense: “The genres of art hitherto dissolve and remain only in title or as a remote, unreal realm of preoccupation for futureless romantics who have arrived too late” (GA 66, p. 31).

Hence, I disagree with Young's reading, according to which the truth of art implies that artworks “represent world” and that this in turn is impossible without representation of objects ( Heidegger's Philosophy of Art , p. 168). As is clear from above, I do not think Heidegger's (or Hegel's) truth is representational in this sense.

Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Stuttgart: Neske, 2000), pp. 9–40.

Robert Bernasconi claims this amounts to Heidegger “pursuing two formally inconsistent strategies,” trying to work with the historical concept of art from its origin in the Greek paradigm while also suggesting that an art that is truly breaking with the metaphysical tradition needs to become something other (“Heidegger's Displacement of the Concept of Art,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics , 2nd revised ed., ed. Michael Kelly [Oxford University Press, 2014]). Here I will merely suggest that my positive interpretation of “art without artworks” could be a way to avoid this inconsistency on Heidegger's behalf.

Heinrich Petzet reports on several quite different works of Klee that grasped Heidegger's attention. Heidegger had the opportunity to study the largest collection of Klee's works in Basel and should have an informed impression of Klee's oevre as a whole. See Heinrich Petzet, Auf einen Stern zugehen: Begegnungen und Gespräche mit Martin Heidegger, 1929–1976 (Frankfurt: Societäts Verlag, 1983), pp. 154–159.

Dennis Schmidt offers a rich interpretation of what Heidegger saw in Klee in Between Word and Image (Indiana University Press, 2013). Schmidt's understanding of the role of the historical situation is very much in line with my own. He notes, however, that Heidegger ultimately seems to give up on modernist painting: “In Klee he saw something even more than he had seen before, and Heidegger came to understand the stakes of the question of art with still more clarity. But, in the end, what he saw was insufficient to offer a reply to what he also saw as the force of the Gestell ” (p. 105).

Here I am indebted to Günther Seubold. Heidegger's notes are not published or accessible, but Seubold received permission to do research into this material and made it available as “Heideggers nachgelassene Klee Notizen,” Heidegger Studies 9 (1993): 5–12. Seubold develops an interpretation of the material in light of Heidegger's thinking in Kunst als Enteignis . Otto Pöggeler has also undertaken to interpret the relationship between the thinker and the painter in Bild und Technik: Heidegger, Klee und die moderne Kunst (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002), fusing Heidegger's work on art with more art historical work on early modernist painting.

As reported in Petzet, Auf einen Stern zugehen , p. 159.

Martin Heidegger, “Kunst und Raum,” in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens , in Gesamtausgabe , vol. 13, ed. Hermann Heidegger (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2002), pp. 203–210 (hereafter, GA 13).

A good example is the work “Wind comb,” made for and displayed on the rocky and windy shore of San Sebastian.

Heidegger, GA 13, p. 204.

Heidegger, GA 13, p. 208. This very clearly echoes the lecture “Bauen Wohnen Denken” that Heidegger gave in 1951. In that lecture, Heidegger focuses on a kind of building that enables living ( wohnen ). He is directly taking on the problem of the technological world, and in this case the destruction, emptiness, and homelessness that follows in its wake.

Here we see that the second feature from Section II, what I labeled nature , is where the parallel between Heidegger and Hegel appears most forced. Contra technology, which leaves all that is seemingly transparent, the opacity or earthy element of, for example, an

abstract sculpture, although never experienced apart from meaning, implies the limitations of thought even in late modernity.

Heidegger, GA 13, p. 209.

Martin Heidegger, “Kunst und Technik,” in Kunst und Technik: Gedächtnisschrift zum 100: Geburtstag von Martin Heidegger , eds. Walter Biemel and Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989), pp. xiii–xiv, at p. xiii.

I have benefited greatly from comments on earlier versions of this paper and thanks are due to participants of SIPHOP, the Eastern meeting of ASA, and especially The Mentoring Workshop for Pre tenure Women Faculty in Philosophy. I also want to thank Franco Trivigno for his feedback.

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Guest Essay

I Don’t Write Like Alice Munro, but I Want to Live Like Her

By Sheila Heti

Ms. Heti is the author of the novels “Pure Colour,” “How Should a Person Be?” and, most recently, “Alphabetical Diaries.”

It is common to say “I was heartbroken to hear” that so-and-so died, but I really do feel heartbroken having learned about Alice Munro, who died on Monday.

As a writer, she modeled, in her life and art, that one must work with emotional sincerity and precision and concentration and depth — not on every kind of writing but on only one kind, the kind closest to one’s heart.

She has long been a North Star for many writers and was someone I have always felt guided by. We are very different writers, but I have kept her in mind, daily and for decades, as an example to follow (but failed to follow to the extent that she demonstrated it): that a fiction writer isn’t someone for hire.

A fiction writer isn’t someone who can write anything — movies, articles, obits! She isn’t a person in service to the magazines, to the newspapers, to the publishers or even to her audience. She doesn’t have to speak on the political issues of the day or on matters of importance to the culture right now but ought first and most to attend seriously to her task, which is her only task, writing the particular thing she was most suited to write.

Ms. Munro only ever wrote short stories — not novels, though she must have been pressured to. She died in a small town not too far from where she was born, choosing to remain close to the sort of people she grew up with, whom she remained ever curious about. Depth is wherever one stands, she showed us, convincingly.

Fiction writers are people, supposedly, who have things to say; they must, because they are so good with words. So people are always asking them: Can you say something about this or about this? But the art of hearing the voice of a fictional person or sensing a fictional world or working for years on some unfathomable creation is, in fact, the opposite of saying something with the opinionated and knowledgeable part of one’s mind. It is rather the humble craft of putting your opinions and ego aside and letting something be said through you.

Ms. Munro held to this division and never let the vanity that can come with being good with words persuade her to put her words just everywhere, in every possible way. Here was the best example in the world — in Canada, my own land — of someone who seemed to abide by classical artistic values in her choices as a person and in her choices on the page. I felt quietly reassured knowing that a hundred kilometers down the road was Alice Munro.

She was also an example of how a writer should be in public: modest, unpretentious, funny, generous and kind. I learned the lesson of generosity from her early. When I was 20 and was just starting to publish short stories, I sent her a fan letter. I don’t remember what my letter said. After a few months, I received a handwritten thank-you note from her in the mail. The fact that she replied at all and did so with such care taught me a lot about grace and consideration and has remained as a warmth within me since that day.

She will always remain for me, and for many others, a model of that grave yet joyous dedication to art — a dedication that inevitably informs the most important choices the artist makes about how to support that life. Probably Ms. Munro would laugh at this; no one knows the compromises another makes, especially when that person is as private as she was and transforms her trials into fiction. Yet whatever the truth of her daily existence, she still shines as a symbol of artistic purity and care.

I am grateful for all she gave to the world and for all the sacrifices she must have made to give it. I’m sorry to be here defying her example, but she was just too loved, and these words just came. Thank you, Alice Munro.

Sheila Heti is the author of the novels “Pure Colour,” “How Should a Person Be?” and, most recently, “Alphabetical Diaries.”

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