Kant and Henry on Kandinsky and abstract art : concerning the inward turn in art

Abstract

For Kant, beauty has less to do with what the object is and more with the way it affects us; for him, an aesthetic judgment on beauty is not a determining but a reflecting judgment. Thus, a genuine aesthetic judgment on nature or art is not about knowledge of what a thing is, or what that painting objectively represents. Rather, the less we pay attention to those concepts, the purer the experience of beauty which nature or art gives us. In his essay Seeing the Invisible, Henry praises Kandinsky for his innovative formulation of abstract art; an art which seeks to turn the artist and the spectator radically inward. Henry argues that, after Kandinsky, art no longer seeks to represent the world; rather, it shifts its focus on what Kandinsky calls the internal. Henry’s claim is that the purpose of art becomes a way that allows us to see what is not seen and cannot be seen. This essay demonstrates to what extent it is possible to draw a connection between Kandinsky’s art and theory through Kant's notion of pure aesthetic judgments and Henry's radical phenomenology.