KANDINSKY INCARNATING BEAUTY

A teacher to Jacques Lacan, André Breton, and Albert Camus, Kojève defined art as the act of extracting the beautiful from objective reality. His poetic text, The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky, endorses nonrepresentational art as uniquely manifesting beauty. Taking the paintings of his renowned uncle, Wassily Kandinsky, as his inspiration, Kojève suggests that in creating (rather than replicating) beauty, the paintings are themselves complete universes as concrete as the natural world.