FIRST MOMENT

HEGEL’S

KANDINSKY DECLARED the fundamentally Hegelian nature of his views in the very
rst lines of Über das Geistige, its opening phrase—“Every work of art is the child of
its time”—having been lifted almost verbatim from the Aesthetics.1 In fact, Kandin-
sky’s entire rst paragraph reads largely as a précis of a key passage in Hegel—though,
signi cantly, one that appears at the end of the Aesthetics’s historical narrative, in the
section that lays out the dissolution of the romantic arts, and so the decline of art
tout court. Here is the relevant passage from Hegel:

Now just as every man is a child of his time in every activity, whether political, reli-
gious, or scienti c, and just as he has the task of bringing out the essential content
and the therefore necessary form of that time, so it is the vocation of art to nd for the
spirit of a people the artistic expression corresponding to it. Now so long as the artist is
bound up with the speci c character of such a world-view and religion, in immediate
identity with it and with rm faith in it, so long is he genuinely in earnest with this
material and its representation . . . only in that event is the artist completely inspired
by his material and its presentation; and his inventions are no product of caprice, they
originate in him, out of him, out of his substantial ground, this stock, this content of
which is not at rest until through the artist it acquires an individual shape adequate to
its inner essence. If, on the other hand, we nowadays propose to make the subject of a
statue or painting a Greek god, or, Protestants as we are today, the Virgin Mary, we are
not seriously in earnest with this material. It is the innermost faith that we lack here.2

Although Kandinsky simpli ed both the Aesthetics’s grammar and its argument,
Hegel’s basic claims persist:

Every work of art is the child of its time, often it is the mother of our emotions. us,
every period of culture produces its own art, which can never be repeated. Any attempt
to give new life to the artistic principles of the past can at best only result in a work
of art that resembles a stillborn child. For example, it is impossible for our inner lives,
our feelings, to be like those of the ancient Greeks. E orts, therefore, to apply Greek
6 PART I — PAINTING IN THEORY

principles, e.g., to sculpture, can only produce forms similar to those employed by the
Greeks, resulting in a work that remains soulless for all time.3

Kandinsky’s decision to begin his text with a passage drawn from the end of the
Aesthetics might easily be seen as part of a larger e ort to reopen the latter’s closure
and thereby revise its historical trajectory. Certainly it was the ending of Hegel’s nar-
rative that posed the greatest challenge to artists of Kandinsky’s generation. In order
to understand why Hegel saw it as the necessary conclusion to his story, and also
how Kandinsky might have seen things otherwise, we will need to sketch out the
general shape and sweep of the Aesthetics’s highly nuanced history of art. It would
also be useful to review, however brie y, the structure of Hegel’s larger philosophical
system, so as to better grasp the crucial but limited place that art occupies within it.
e idea of spirit (Geist) is the central motif of both the Aesthetics and the
Hegelian system at large. By “spirit,” Hegel intended a collective human subjectiv-
ity or consciousness, whose development over time could be seen to account for
all signi cant—his phrase is “world-historical”—political, religious, intellectual,
and artistic change. e 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit was the rst of Hegel’s books
to try to describe at least a portion of the circuitous route that spirit had traveled
on its path to the present. e text has therefore occasionally been regarded as a
sort of Bildungsroman, recounting the growth and maturation of its protagonist
over the course and as a result of its various, frequently harrowing experiences. In-
deed, that latter term, experience (Erfahrung), is also an important one for Hegel,
and is intimately bound up with his conception of the dialectical structure of his-
tory. As Frederick Beiser explains,

Hegel is . . . reviving the original sense of the term, according to which ‘Erfahrung’
is anything one learns through experiment, through trial and error, or through en-
quiry about what appears to be the case. . . . [It] is therefore to be taken in its literal
meaning: a journey or adventure ( fahren), which arrives at a result (er-fahren), so that
‘Erfahrung’ is quite literally ‘das Ergebnis des Fahrens.’ e journey undertaken by con-
sciousness [or spirit] in the Phenomenology is that of its own dialectic, and what it lives
through as a result of this dialectic is its experience.4

Crucial to Hegel’s conception of experience is his assertion that spirit never

ends its journey in quite the same state or place from which it set o . e dialec-
tic entails a movement outside into otherness, followed by re ection, and then
a “return” to a self that has been substantially changed through the process. Of
the several means by which spirit has externalized or stepped outside itself, art,
according to Hegel, was initially the most important.5 Historically, works of art
were above all a way that spirit took sensuous, material form, and so brought itself
 FIRST MOMENT 7

before itself, for the speci c purpose of its conscious self-re ection. Humanity’s
increasing self-awareness—and more, its realization of freedom—has come in no
small measure, Hegel says, through the experience of art.
e freedom at issue here is principally a freedom from nature’s determinacy.6
In the Aesthetics, Hegel argues that the earliest works of art gave form to a con-
sciousness or spirit that was still trying to extricate itself from its subservience to
nature, and so was not to be fully reconciled with sensuous materiality. As yet
vague and undeveloped, with no sense of its own autonomy, spirit could express
itself only indirectly; works of art could do nothing more than point to their spiri-
tual content through their obdurate material form. is is presumably what Hegel
has in mind when he refers to art’s earliest period as symbolic,7 and designates
architecture as its predominant and most characteristic form. Hegel argues that
the material used in these early works was inherently non-spiritual—mostly heavy
stone whose shape was limited by the law of gravity—and that whatever mean-
ing the works themselves may have had was carried by, or in some cases merely
stamped onto, their external surfaces (see Figure 1).8

FIGURE 1. Temple of Amen-Re, Karnak, Egypt, Dynasty XIX, ca. 1290–1224 bce.
© 2013 Robert Harding Picture Library Ltd.
8 PART I — PAINTING IN THEORY

During the ensuing classical period, by contrast, sculpture became the pre-
dominant form of art. Classical sculptures were still produced out of heavy matter,
of course, but now with little regard for its weight and natural properties (Fig-
ure 2). Each work’s form was determined solely by its chosen subject matter, which
in this period, Hegel observes, was almost always the human form. e Aesthetics
emphasizes that the cultural beliefs of ancient Greece were perfectly suited to
sensuous embodiment—witness the anthropomorphism of its gods—so that the
gures of classical Greek sculpture seemed thoroughly pervaded by spirit, their
form and content fused in an indissoluble unity. In this sense the classical work of
art didn’t so much mean (in the way that either a sign or symbol might) as simply
exist: a pure self-showing.

FIGURE 2. Artemision Zeus, ca. 460 bce. Bronze, approx. 6ʹ10ʺ high. National Archaeological
Museum, Athens. © Jack Balcer Image Archive, Ohio State University.
 FIRST MOMENT 9

Yet the introduction of subjectivity into both the content of the work and
the form of its presentation signaled the demise of the classical era. According to
Hegel, in the ensuing romantic period, which arose with the advent of Christian-
ity, spirit came to be characterized by a profound and ever-growing inwardness
that, unlike the spirituality of the ancient Greeks, was only imperfectly expressed
in the sensuous externality of art. Clearly sculpture was no longer up to the task,
as it was unable to present consciousness as something withdrawn out of the sphere
of material embodiment into self-re ection. It was instead in the painting of the
romantic era (Figure 3) that inner subjectivity rst found its adequate expression.
Painting accomplished this by presenting its subjects in an arti cial or “unnatural”
space, one that had been created by subjectivity itself, for the purpose of its own
self-contemplation. is was the space of visual illusion—the term Hegel uses is
Schein—and it e ectively dissolved the sense that what one beheld in the work
was something objective, independent, and solidly material.

e work of sculpture has to retain [its independence] because its content is what it is,
within and without, self-reposing, self-complete, and objective. Whereas in painting

FIGURE 3. Jan van Eyck, Madonna with Canon van der Paele, 1436. Oil and tempera on wood, 122.1 × 157.8 cm. Groeninge
Museum, Bruges. e Art Archive at Art Resource, New York.
10 PART I — PAINTING IN THEORY

the content is subjectivity, more precisely the inner life inwardly particularized, and for
this very reason the separation in the work of art between its subject and the spectator
must emerge and yet must immediately be dissipated because, by displaying what is
subjective, the work, in its whole mode of presentation, reveals its purpose as existing
not independently on its own account but for subjective apprehension, for the specta-
tor. e spectator is, as it were, in it from the beginning . . . and the work exists only
for this xed point, i.e. for the individual apprehending it.9

In its presentation of a space that was only apparently three-dimensional—that

existed only through and for human consciousness—romantic painting was to be
seen, Hegel argued, as a direct manifestation of spirit’s increasing inwardness and
autonomy. Painting’s illusionistic space was one, moreover, in which human drama
could unfold, and during the romantic era gesture and facial expression—along
with other means for suggesting the interior life of the gures portrayed—were
similarly perfected over time (see Figure 4).
e romantic era di ered from its predecessors, however, in that no single art
form could be seen to predominate over its entire duration. At a certain moment,
as Hegel tells it, spirit achieved a state of subjective inwardness no longer suited

FIGURE 4. Rembrandt van Rijn, Syndics of the Cloth Guild, 1662. Oil on canvas, 185 × 274 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. bpk,
Berlin / Rijksmuseum Amsterdam / Hermann Buresch / Art Resource, New York.
 FIRST MOMENT 11

to even the most subtle of paintings, at which point rst music and then poetry
(with their still greater immateriality) rose to prominence among the arts. Already
with the romantic era, then, we witness the dissolution, and so the beginning of
the end, of art. Not that buildings, sculptures, paintings, musical compositions,
and poems wouldn’t continue to be produced. ey would, but they would no
longer function as the primary vehicle of spirit—which is to say that they would
no longer serve as the place where humanity realized its deepest and most mean-
ingful truths. at role was given over rst to religion and nally to philosophy,
from whose vantage point it could be seen that the history of art belonged not,
ultimately, to art itself; instead it constituted only a moment (now passed) within
the larger history of spirit.
Because the story the Aesthetics has to tell is not in the end its own, it doesn’t
follow the same dialectical structure of other Hegelian narratives.10 In both the
Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic, for example, thought is seen to
progress through three interrelated stages: from the universal (characterized by an
inchoate unity), to the particular (in which energies are directed toward the dif-
ferentiation of parts), and nally to an integration of those two earlier moments
in a concrete individuality able to comprehend not only the whole but also the
place of the parts within it. If the larger movement from art through religion to
philosophy generally follows this pattern, the speci cally art-historical narrative
of the Aesthetics does not. We are instead presented with an inverted dialectic, an
“unhappy” turn of events: art reaches its apex in the second (classical) moment,
and then ends its story in the dispersion of its particular forms. e task of gather-
ing those pieces together and reintegrating them into a meaningful whole is left
to philosophy—more precisely, to the comprehensive system that Hegel himself
articulated in the Aesthetics and elsewhere.