The aesthetic contemplation: Schopenahuer and Mondrian

Abstract

In this text, we search to explore the relations between Mondrian’s contemplative aesthetics and Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of the Beautiful. The notions of abstraction and contemplation and their meanings for the artist and the philosopher are carefully examined here. The progressive emptying of the work’s content drives to the notion of abstract art that searches to reach the Idea or the Universal. This emptying, in its turn, brings the plastic arts closer to music, whose elements are more subtle.