The Origin of Critic-Silencing Abstract Art Marketing
Wassily Kandinsky; Rurth Ahmedzai Kemp, tr., Concerning the Spiritual in Art (with a Focus on Painting) and The Question of Form (London: Penguin Classics, May 13, 2025). Paperback: $16. 192pp, 5-1/16X7-3/4”. ISBN: 978-0-24138-48-0.
*****
“Wassily Kandinsky, one of the most famous abstract painters of all time, urges the reader to free themselves from art’s traditional bonds to material reality.” I would usually subtract puffery from a blurb, but in this case the puffery is the main premise: explaining why this book was deemed worthy of publication by Penguin Classics. “In this radical theoretical work, he calls for a spiritual revolution in painting, arguing that artists, much like musicians, should be allowed to express their own inner lives in abstract, non-material terms. Investigating form and color, spirituality and tradition, Kandinsky explores art’s resonance with the soul, its purpose and nature, and its power to inspire us, to stir our emotions and to help us see beyond the limits of our world. A… contribution to the understanding of non-objectivism in art…”
The “Introduction” explains that the first edition of this book appeared in German in 1912, and was first translated into English in 1914. Without a biography, the editor then dives into the covered theory. And it is mostly nonsense talk. Kandinsky argues for art “radiating” an artist’s “subtler experience” in their “soul”, baking a “spiritual bread to feed this… spiritual awakening”. Since a “soul” is unreal, unseen, and otherwise fictional, this argument is for critics to imagine art has unseen value even when the reality of what it is valueless (22-4). The parts that do make sense are plagiarizing or echoing Hegel’s Aesthetics, which argued art was “a vehicle for the developing self-consciousness of spirit”. Specifically: “The opening phrase of Concerning… ‘every work of art is the child of its time’—is lifted almost verbatim from the Aesthetics”. This is also the source of frequent references to “inner necessity”. It is a reproduction of Hegel that substitutes Hegel’s economics with references to Kandinsky’s own “abstract or non-representational paintings” (ix-x). Though oddly “in 1911 Kandinsky had not yet made any wholly non-representational paintings”, so this work is a “theoretical defense” of future work “in advance of its actual production” (xiii). This book’s success is why Kandinsky’s later paintings sold well as well. So, this work was a marketing tool that prepared the art market for buying nonsensical, or visually empty of complex content art before artists were contracted to execute this degraded vision. Curiously, this work also echoes “Viennese composer” Arnold Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony (1911), on which Schoenberg was working when Kandinsky wrote to him and formed a friendship. Kandinsky argues that Schoenberger has been “dismissed ‘as a ‘swindler’ and a charlatan’”. The one insult I found about Schoenberg appeared in peter Gay’s Schnitzler’s Century (2002): in December 1908, Arthur Schnitzler listened to Schoenberg’s “second quartet, opus 10” and wrote that during the show the audience had screamed: “Scandal!” Then, in 1912, he wrote that “Schenberg” was talked about as one of the known “swindle[s]” (221-2). Either way, Kandinsky borrows Schoenberg’s distinction between “dissonance” and “consonance” in music without much clarity regarding what relevance these musical terms have to art (xvi). In one section, Kandinsky objects to the use of echoing colors in a painting. He finds that “combining… two adjacent colors… to construct the chromatic harmony” is “inappropriate for the complex times in which we live” when “contrasts and contradictions—this is the harmony of our times” (81). This is a simplification. Surely, there are some subjects that require harmony, and some that require disharmony. Banning all color-harmony is clearly an absurd exercise that is contrary to achieving some authentic interpretation of reality in art. Though even this seemingly original note was not Kandinsky, but rather borrowed from Ewald Hering’s 1870s “opponent-process” theory that recommended simplifying colors to four, and preferring to use “oppositional pairs (green versus red, blue versus yellow)” because the eyes tend to notice opposition because of how “sensory responses” work (xviii). Kandinsky really should have cited these sources if his work almost entirely borrows from them with some nonsensical overlayed comments. While I am growing more and more annoyed with Kandinsky, the author of these introductory comments is doing a great job with explaining the artistic theory behind the convoluted phraseology that Kandinsky turned relatively simply ideas into. The translator has inserted annotative markets across the text to explain some of these citations missing in the original to make Kandinsky seem to be inventing this artistic science entirely on his own. One note explains a Biblical “Parable of the Talents” is being referred to, and explains what this parable is to clarify the reference (146).
The interior of the translated book is divided into sections on “Art in General”, and “Painting”.
I searched for what Kandinsky writes about the abstract. Kandinsky claims that the “urge” to derive a “pure composition” has turned people towards “what is most regular and also most abstract”, such as a triangle, or in more complex “numerical formulas” as seen in “Cubism” (squarism?). Kandinsky demands artists be given complete control over the degree of abstraction or “representation” in their work. “The lay person” is instructed to avoid questioning or describing: “What has the artist not done?” In other words, abstract artists who simply draw a triangle should not be asked why they have been lazy, and failed to present a more complex creation. The propagandistically allowed question is: “What has the artist done here? In what way has the artist expressed his own inner intention?” (133-4). He derides “critics” for “seeking out what is negative and deficient” and pressures them to be “conveying what is positive and proficient”, serving as puffers of art-dealers, and artists. Noting the logical question “regarding abstract art” critics raise: “How can we even distinguish between deficiency and proficiency? How does one identify a flaw?” He claims that while a negative and a positive would devalue a horse, in an “artwork… one important positive quality outweighs all the negatives, lending it value” (134-5). “The strong abstract resonance of physical forms does not necessarily mean the destruction of the representational…” as “component elements… become independently resonant abstract forms adding up to a holistic, abstract predominant sound” (135). In combination, this explains how most modern art critics still puff “abstract” art as superior, or sell for millions works with extremely simple shapes.
The non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is a recent reenactment of this trend, as the market cap worth of the “global NFT market”, according to Forbes, on May 14, 2025, is $77.43 billion. The NFTs are almost entirely abstract, cartoonish, nonsensical, and otherwise artistically horrid creations, and yet this is the category of art that seems to be worth more than the entirety of the serious “global art market that is only worth $57.5 billion” based on transactions carried out in 2024 (The Art Market).
The main point of art has become for crooks to launder money, or engage in tax-evasion, or other financial frauds. It is not to sponsor great artists in achieving heights of artistic excellence. And apparently, Kandinsky’s book was instrumental in driving the art market towards this increasingly trashy end. Given this, artists, critics, and art sellers absolutely must read this book to understand just what they are arguing for when they argue for “abstract” art that allows the artist to be as horrid as he wants to be, without allowing for critical objections.
Pennsylvania Literary Journal: Spring 2025 issue: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-spring-2025