"The title of Kandinsky's first great theoretical work, On the Spiritual in Art and in Painting in particular which had a huge influence, thus has a rigorous meaning. It bears a twofold judgment, both on this epoch whose distress is perceived by Kandinsky and on the true reality of things. Our time is a distressed time because it is forgetful of reality and has abandoned itself to the increasing objectivism promoted by science. The ideological fulfillment of this type of thought which is given over to the External and thus deprived of what is essential is naturalism, to which the stiff and empty art from the nineteenth century provides overwhelming testimony. Its practical consequence is the materialism that spreads the negation of life's true essence across all the spheres of life, thereby offering itself as a sort of concrete nihilism whose true name is death. Faced with this situation, On the Spiritual in Art and in Painting in particular offers a programme of revitalization."

“Yet, we have shown that Kandinsky's dream for the monumentality of synthetic art does not rely on a mere increase of the number of means used. The Bauhaus programme was that the distribution of light and the use of space in a building with mural paintings and sculptures added to the mere functionality of the architecture. It gave the architecture an ability to respond to the multi-faced call of human sensibility and allowed it to exercise its potential richness. But, as a result of overturning the grandiloquence illustrated by the Neo-classicism of the 1830s, Kandinsky understood that the synthesis of the arts could only be subjective. It draws the single but differentiated principle of its constructions from the force of pathos, its inner conflicts and its fate. Kandinsky's abstraction works directly on the affective tonalities; it defines, discloses, sharpens, overlaps and combines them; it scrutinizes and brings out their history together with the secret transformations that they make. The monumentality it builds is the monumentality of life whose full powers are restored. Aesthetic creation is nothing but the construction of this inner monumentality.”

“Painting does not use language. Abstract painting teaches us this, and this is what gives it its power of expression. If colour does not relate to the feelings of our soul through an external relation but finds its true being in them – as a pure sensation and a pure experience – then it does not even need to translate, through a means, the abstract content of our invisible life. It coincides with our invisible life and is its pathos: its suffering, its boredom, its neglect or its joy.”

“Kandinsky calls the content that painting must express, that is, our invisibility , 'abstract'. So, the Kandinskian equation can now be written as follows: Interior = interiority = invisible = life = pathos = abstract. Kandinsky also calls the means of painting 'abstract', so long as they are grasped in their purity. To the extent that they are abstract, colours and drawings are likewise inscribed in the equation formulated above, the equation which forms the original dimension of Being itself. In this respect, we have just discovered the true meaning of the concept of abstraction applied to painting.”

“As usual, history reverses the true order of things, the ontological order of their foundation. Kandinsky never truly asked himself what would replace the object and what painting would be able to paint from then on. Ever since a walk in the countryside around Munich where the violence of a colour perceived in the undergrowth gave rise to an intense emotion and he decided to paint what surrounded this colour -- the view of this woods -- in order to represent this emotion, he knew with a knowledge that no reflection can clarify and that no history precedes, with a knowledge that is constituted by this emotion itself, that he wanted to paint this emotion and this emotion was the only thing that he would paint thereafter. This was the content of all possible paintings: the profusion of life in himself, its intensification and exaltation.”

“The possibility of expressing life through lines can be established, if we suppose that life is essentially -- in virtue of what makes it alive -- a force, and if we suppose that the forces acting simultaneously or successively on the point in such a way as to produce what we call straight, curved, or angular lines are in reality the forces of life, and that no other forces exist. Not only each force but each drive within the framework of subjectivity has its immediate equivalent in a specific linear form, since the force's intensity, its changes, the time of its action, its interruptions and its returns have their exact corollary in the genus and accidents of the linear forms described above.”

“What are these being that constitute the cosmos ? They are every thing and element of a thing, inasmuch as they are sensible. They only exist in this way, that is, in sensibility. In this respect, they are subjectivities. In this respect, the world is filled with resonances: all of the vibrations marking its repercussions in the soul and the spiritual action that they exert. In this respect, all matter -- while seemingly dead -- is a tonality and a living spirit. This much is clear: abstraction's reduction of the elements to their pure pictoriality signifies the reduction of the cosmos to its true reality. The question of abstract painting is the question of the universe.”