What did Wassily Kandinsky mean by “the spiritual in art”? In his long-canonical treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Melerei (Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Especially in Painting) (Munich: R. Piper, 1912), the artist does not quite say, though he clearly conceives it in some opposition to the creeping materialism that he assails as the defining feature of the modern world. Scholars, seeking a tighter definition, have often seized on a short, early passage in the text that explicitly evokes Theosophy, even as they have also linked the painter to Eastern mysticism and diverse spiritualist sects of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kandinsky is hardly the only major modernist to have been connected to such currents; Piet Mondrian also comes to mind. Yet while Yve-Alain Bois long ago put forth a powerful revisionist view of the latter, Kandinsky has never quite shaken his associations with occult strains. As a result, this founding father of abstraction has long appeared a romantic if not retrograde figure. Although he was a painter and writer of incontestable consequence, many critics have nonetheless felt unable to take him seriously.

Lisa Florman’s deeply considered and beautifully written book stands to change a good many minds. Concerning the Spiritual—and the Concrete—in Kandinsky’s Art does not directly contest the painter’s connections with Madame Blavatsky et al., but it does not dwell on them either. Rather, Florman insists on another, in her view far more determining, context: the aesthetic philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel. In suggesting that we hear Hegel’s Geist in Kandinsky’s Geistige, Florman puts forward an altogether original account of the painter’s oeuvre.

Hegel has long been a problematic figure for the discipline of art history. While Florman does not emphasize this point, it adds interest to the story of Kandinsky’s early practice unfolding in the German-language world contemporaneously with the emergence of foundational texts by Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin, among others. (Riegl’s Das holländische Gruppenporträt [The Group Portraiture of Holland] appeared in 1902; Wölfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe [The Principles of Art History] was published in 1915.) Like these art historians, Kandinsky found himself facing a profound conundrum. Hegel offered a powerful vision of art’s onetime centrality to the work of thought, positioning “sensuous knowing” as a crucial early vehicle by which human subjects gradually came to consciousness—and ultimately, self-consciousness—through increasingly sophisticated negotiations with the outside world. Yet he also claimed that art had long ago ceased to matter in this way, having ceded its role to higher, more “spiritual” modes of thought: first religion, then philosophy. By situating Kandinsky as a figure fully at grips with these claims, Florman aims both to complicate the artist’s longstanding classification as an expressionist (the “spirit” at stake is by no means strictly or even primarily personal) and to displace the view—put forth by no less a philosophical heavyweight than Theodor Adorno—of the painter as naively spurning materiality. According to Florman, Kandinsky did not seek to convey the movements of an untrammeled and perhaps ineffable subjectivity; rather, he sought to render painting itself newly objective—a reinvigorated motor for historical change in an uneasy modernity.

In making this case, Florman highlights the crucial mediating role of Kandinsky’s nephew, the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. The latter’s seminar on the Phenomenology of Spirit, which was held at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales between 1933 and 1939 and included Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty among its auditors, helped define the shape and tenor of French Hegelianism for much of the twentieth century. Kandinsky’s arrival in Paris coincided with the beginning of the course, and it appears to have inaugurated a period of active and mutually stimulating exchanges between the two men. In the summer of 1936, this dialogue led Kojève—seemingly at his uncle’s request—to write an essay on Kandinsky’s art, offering the younger man’s take on the historical implications of the painter’s practice. Left unpublished until 1985 (although a much abridged version appeared in 1966), “Les Peintures concrètes de Kandinsky” (“The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky”) (Revue de métaphysique et de morale 90, no. 2 (1985): 149–71) has remained largely on the sidelines of the critical literature on Kandinsky’s art. Florman renders this contribution legible in more ways than one; having unpacked the essay at length in her text, she also provides the first complete English translation as an appendix. Framed as a further efflorescence of the painter’s lifelong reckoning with Hegelian thought, “Les Peintures concrètes de Kandinsky” ceases to appear as an intriguing but more or less idiosyncratic take on Kandinsky’s achievement and emerges as a central document for the fuller apprehension of his work and thought.

Concerning the Spiritual—and the Concrete—in Kandinsky’s Art is divided into two parts. The first, entitled “Painting in Theory,” is primarily textual in emphasis. It tracks the emergence and progressive reshaping of a fundamentally Hegelian conception of the Geistige in art, as it passes from the philosopher’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Lectures on Aesthetics) (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1835–38) to Kandinsky and ultimately Kojève. The movement of Florman’s book self-consciously tropes the triadic structure of the Hegelian dialectic, presenting each figure’s contribution as one distinctive moment in the progressive emergence of a highly particular consciousness of painting. But what Florman’s study conjures, it also displaces; by divesting Hegel’s thinking of the closure and finality so often ascribed to it, Florman effectively posits his defining synthesis as but a particularly brilliant thesis, thereby opening his narrative to further reading and revision.

What is fundamentally at stake here is, of course, the possibility of art continuing to matter beyond the limits attributed to it in the Hegelian system. Florman therefore begins, as indeed she must, with an overview of Hegel’s Aesthetics (“First Moment”). Her writing is lucid and accessible, presuming no prior specialization in the philosopher’s work. She then turns to two key texts by Kandinsky: “Second Moment: Part I” focuses on the aforementioned Über das Geistige in der Kunst (although bearing the publication date of 1912, Kandinsky likely wrote it in 1909 or 1910 and it was published in December 1911), while “Second Moment: Part II” considers the Bauhaus-era Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane) (Munich: Albert Langen, 1926). Florman calls attention to a number of textual near-repetitions, echoes, and rhymes that show the artist effectively “rewriting” the Hegelian narrative, so as to frame abstract painting as possessed of spiritual—that is, historically efficacious—possibilities neither imagined by Hegel nor subsumable within his system. The “Third Moment,” finally, is dedicated to Kojève’s “Les Peintures concrètes de Kandinsky,” as it “corrects” the painter’s writing in turn. It is here that we first encounter the idea of the “concrete” that informs Kojève’s and Florman’s titles alike, and it serves to analogize the fully achieved non-representational tableau (another term on which Kojève insists) to the Hegelian concept, construed as an “organically unified” and “self-sustaining” whole. Integral to these maneuvers, as Florman shows, is a highly particular understanding of “the Beautiful” that would “open for art the possibility of a history that would not simply be a chapter (relatively brief and long since concluded) within the larger history of spirit” (45).

One would, at times, like to know more about the possible interfaces of Florman’s richly philosophical readings with more local contexts and discourses. To what extent, for example, was the abandonment of “abstract” for “concrete” tied to broader terminological debates among Kandinsky’s contemporaries? (In 1936, Kandinsky participated in the exhibition Abstract and Concrete at the Lefevre Gallery in London, alongside László Moholy-Nagy, Joan Miró, Barbara Hepworth, and Ben Nicholson, among others, and the artist Jean Arp was also known to prefer the term “concrete.”) And given the complex history of the term “tableau,” one wonders to what extent, if any, Kojève’s use of the word intersected with, or drew impetus from, the French critical tradition. Florman’s tight focus nonetheless enables a new understanding of the ways in which Kojève’s discursive displacements do not simply contradict, but in fact figure meaningfully within, the painter’s evolving and continually self-complicating understanding of his own endeavor.

Part 2, “Painting in Practice,” turns to Kandinsky’s painted oeuvre. Artworks were not altogether absent from the preceding pages; Florman’s readings of Über das Geistige in der Kunst and Punkt und Linie zu Fläche both culminate in sustained analyses of roughly contemporaneous paintings, while the section on Kojève closes with a densely layered interpretation of Kandinsky’s 1936 canvas Thirty—a work Florman positions as a self-conscious response to the younger man’s arguments—that is among the highpoints of the book as a whole. Nonetheless, the close descriptive work that drives this second half is of a different order, amounting to one sustained argument that the dialectical logic Florman believes is manifest in the texts also animates the artist’s oeuvre as a whole.

Thus the chronological sweep of Florman’s account, which tracks the development of Kandinsky’s painting from roughly 1911, when he began gradually to abandon representational elements, to the years before his death in December 1944. This expansive view is offered as a corrective both to what emerges as Kojève’s intense focus on the one-time leap from representational to “concrete,” and to art-historical accounts that tend to similarly privilege the breakthrough canvases of Kandinsky’s Münster period. Florman’s patient and detailed analyses open up the formal and philosophical stakes of a broad array of specific features of Kandinsky’s practice, including his occasional use of the Quetschtechnik (the “squashing” of the brush against the canvas to produce tactile dots and piles of pigment) and his increasing proclivity for transparency effects of various kinds. Most important, however, Florman situates these aspects as practices and effects that became available to Kandinsky in time; they therefore speak of a perennially developing conception of his enterprise in its totality.

The extraordinarily nuanced readings in Concerning the Spiritual—and the Concrete—in Kandinsky’s Art do not lend themselves to excerpting; rather, each part is fully significant only within the whole. Far from a weakness, however, this may be the most compelling aspect of Florman’s study. It allows readers to grasp the extent to which for Kandinsky, as for Hegel before him, paintings are sites of active struggle and complex self-recognition—processes and not simply objects. The implications of this idea extend well beyond inquiries into pictorial modernism and the origins of abstraction, opening onto larger disciplinary questions about the deep historicalness of art. If Hegel can help us to see Kandinsky anew, Florman’s study suggests the inverse is also true.