piritual and magic in art: The notion of genius in Kandinsky’s oeuvre

Abstract

This text is meant to be an essay on the matter of the Spiritual in Kandinsky’s pictorial theory. Here, I try to highlight the idea that the conceptions of the Russian painter, largely conceived in consonance with the esoteric thought of the late nineteenth century, are very close to a kind of magical cosmology, which holds a similar viewto that of the categories of magic thought in accordance with Marcel Mauss. At the core of this cosmology, art is placed, a synthesis of the Spiritual, whose central notion is that of genius, largely inherited from Kant, as I intend to propose.