Abstract

This dissertation contextualizes three main components of Wassily Kandinsky's aesthetic theory within a history of ideas stretching from Kant to Worringer. The goal of this project is to ground Kandinsky's explanations and justifications for the turn to abstraction and the non-objective in modern art in a deeply Idealist philosophical tradition. The three ideas traceable to a predominantly Hegelian context, and upon which this study concentrates, are as follows: form and content, the concept of "inner necessity" , and the notion of a "Third" spiritual-historical era. ;Kandinsky's repeated arguments about the relationship between form and content in art can be understood most dearly when the origins of this "problem" in modern aesthetics are followed back to Kant and Hegel. The concept of "inner necessity," all but unexplored by scholars, is immediately to be connected with the Kunstwollen of Riegl and Worringer, and both of these difficult terms are argued in this study to have emerged out of the older Idealist and historicist views on freedom and necessity. Lastly, the idea of a "Third Era" in history, which Kandinsky refers to as the "Epoch of the Great Spiritual," may have its most distant origins in the medieval mystic Joachim of Fiore. Its importance for Kandinsky's aesthetics, however, is its relation to the last of Hegel's three stages of art's history: the "Romantic" period, when the visual and sensual cease to suffice as forms of aesthetic communication. For Kandinsky, modernist abstraction arises and develops similarly in a third, spiritual era as "inner necessity" forces inner content beyond the limits of traditional, external form. ;Though the three aesthetic elements are treated individually in this study, the point of the dissertation as a whole is to illustrate their roles as part of an overall aesthetic theory that is unified and coherent. Kandinsky's "epochal" move towards the non-objective world of form and color can, as a result, be understood not only in relation to the influence of Theosophy or the occult, but as part of a natural development in a modernist project thoroughly rooted in nineteenth-century Idealist philosophy and aesthetics