What do you think?
Rate this book
Kandinsky: Incarnating Beauty
A compilation of esoteric musings, Incarnating Beauty explores Alexandre Kojève’s philosophical approach to the relationship between art and 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. Kojève’s text considers the utility and necessity of beauty in life, and ultimately poses the involuted What is beauty?
Including personal letters between Kandinsky and his nephew, this book further elaborates the unique relationship between artist and philosopher. An introduction by Boris Groys contextualizes Kojève’s life and writings.
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. Kojève’s text considers the utility and necessity of beauty in life, and ultimately poses the involuted What is beauty?
Including personal letters between Kandinsky and his nephew, this book further elaborates the unique relationship between artist and philosopher. An introduction by Boris Groys contextualizes Kojève’s life and writings.
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1936
5 people are currently reading
178 people want to read
About the author
Alexandre Kojève
37 books166 followersAlexandre Kojève was a Russian-born French philosopher and statesman whose philosophical seminars had an immense influence on twentieth-century French philosophy, particularly via his integration of Hegelian concepts into continental philosophy. As a statesman in the French government, he was instrumental in the creation of the European Union. Kojève was a close friend of, and was in lifelong philosophical dialogue with, Leo Strauss.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 2, 2026
Two and a half stars.
It's not a terrible piece of work, and it has moments of subtle analysis, but I just think Kojève is fundamentally barking up the wrong tree here.
Kojève thinks that what separates art from material things is that regular objects are first and foremost what they are, and only then secondarily beautiful. Beautiful by happenstance almost. Art on the other hand is the incarnation of the beauty of the concrete, and if it is not beautiful, it is a nullity-worthless, worthy only "to be destroyed" as he puts it.
I think this is a very fashy take, of the thought-terminating variety. Anyone who follows my reviews will know that I'm not against engaging with fascist authors. The ones that are worth engaging with however are the Robert Michelses, the Carl Schmitts of the world. These are men who write about authority, legality and violence frankly and openly, in a way that other traditions, even the Marxist ones, often shy away from. It is on this basis that they add to the conversation.
On the other hand, "what isn't beautiful is inherently bad art and is worthy only of being destroyed," is not a productive or helpful thought. Either you end up with the Nazi Museum of Degenerate Art that must be shunned, or you end up with a definition of beauty that is utterly vacuous- a mere synonym for "good art."
Now, this isn't the typical fascist tirade about abstract art--in fact the entire paper is dedicated to defending Kandinsky's abstract art as amongst the highest forms of art:
> This Beautiful was not "extracted" or "abstracted" from a real, non-artistic object which would be "also" beautiful but "primarily" something else. The Beautiful of the tableau "Circle-Triangle" exists nowhere outside the tableau. Just as the tableau "represents" nothing external to it, its Beautiful is also purely immanent.
This part is ok, but there are still problems. Firstly, I don't think it's true that Kandinsky's work is *utterly* non-representational. Now I'm not saying the distinction between representational and non-representational art doesn't exist, or isn't worth sustaining in the case of Kandinsky. But I also think there's a limit. Kandinsky's forms of circle and triangle one sees whenever one does geometry. Likewise, if you take a Platonism view of mathematics, then Kandinsky is, in a very literal way, extracting the beauty of the Forms.
Something like Duchamp's *Fountain* (aka the R. Mutt urinal) is much more radically nonrepresentational.
Unfortunately, he soon goes off the rails:
> In a certain sense, the tableau "Circle-Triangle" is even more real and complete, which is to say more concrete, than the real tree. In fact the tree is not uniquely in itself, for itself, by itself; it is on Earth, under the sky, alongside other things...
One is screaming at this point "so is art!" Art does not exist by itself, in itself and for itself. Even in its abstractions it is grounded by the mind and therefore broader society that made it. There is plenty of art that I find worthwhile that isn't "beautiful." Not even just *traditionally* beautiful, but beautiful in any sense of the term. The horribly awe-inspiring or disgusting can be good art, and if this is "beautiful" then I question the usage of the word "beautiful.
It's not that Kojève's view is *incoherent*, I just don't think it's the best tool for the job. Compare and contrast Iris Murdoch's view of art and morality:
Murdoch uses art as an intuition pump for morality, so she has a somewhat unified view of axiology, which is a kind of non-naturalism based on the transcendental nature of the Good. Murdoch uses Plato's metaphor of the sun from his allegory of the cave: The Good illuminates everything, it is what allows one to make decisions and get a grasp on things. But one cannot look directly at it: any attempt to pin it down and it dissolves in your hands. Whenever one tries to limit the Good to one finite thing, several problems arise.
First, one can always imagine a *better X*, an X that is somehow beyond what is actually properly incarnatable.
Second, by trying to limit the Good to a particular sphere, one ends up simply defining a *Good X*, rather than *The Good*.
And third and most catastrophically, to actually explain what the Good is in a particular situation, one inevitably ends up having to use examples from other fields as metaphors to explain what one means.
Given that one cannot grasp the Good as such, to properly interact with Good Things, to figure out which things *are* Good (or better/worse), one needs to openly and honestly sit with the thing. One must sit with it, turn it over, learn its properties and the properties of alternatives. One must surrender one's pre-judgements and what makes one comfortable, and really "surrender to the life of the object," to use Hegel's phrasing. Only then can one make a truly right decision, rather than a rushed, surface-level one.
This, I think, says something far more useful and meaningful about art than Kojève: Good art takes work, it takes thought and conversation. It *means something*, teaches us about ourselves and the world, and pulls us out of our everyday anxieties and self-centeredness in order to *appreciate and surrender to the Other.*
But as much as I dislike Kojève's view, it would be wrong to completely discard it: it would be utterly ridiculous to say that beauty is irrelevant to art. There is plenty of art that is simply beautiful and is valuable on that basis. It would be utterly exhausting if every piece of art said something deep and powerful to the human condition. Sometimes what you need is simply a good time. At the same time though, truly Great Art must be memorable, and not merely on the level of form. It must reveal something, teach us something, force us to go beyond ourselves and be stunned in awe, to "surrender to the life of the object."
Thus, maybe a typology like this is closer to the truth:
It's not a terrible piece of work, and it has moments of subtle analysis, but I just think Kojève is fundamentally barking up the wrong tree here.
Kojève thinks that what separates art from material things is that regular objects are first and foremost what they are, and only then secondarily beautiful. Beautiful by happenstance almost. Art on the other hand is the incarnation of the beauty of the concrete, and if it is not beautiful, it is a nullity-worthless, worthy only "to be destroyed" as he puts it.
I think this is a very fashy take, of the thought-terminating variety. Anyone who follows my reviews will know that I'm not against engaging with fascist authors. The ones that are worth engaging with however are the Robert Michelses, the Carl Schmitts of the world. These are men who write about authority, legality and violence frankly and openly, in a way that other traditions, even the Marxist ones, often shy away from. It is on this basis that they add to the conversation.
On the other hand, "what isn't beautiful is inherently bad art and is worthy only of being destroyed," is not a productive or helpful thought. Either you end up with the Nazi Museum of Degenerate Art that must be shunned, or you end up with a definition of beauty that is utterly vacuous- a mere synonym for "good art."
Now, this isn't the typical fascist tirade about abstract art--in fact the entire paper is dedicated to defending Kandinsky's abstract art as amongst the highest forms of art:
> This Beautiful was not "extracted" or "abstracted" from a real, non-artistic object which would be "also" beautiful but "primarily" something else. The Beautiful of the tableau "Circle-Triangle" exists nowhere outside the tableau. Just as the tableau "represents" nothing external to it, its Beautiful is also purely immanent.
This part is ok, but there are still problems. Firstly, I don't think it's true that Kandinsky's work is *utterly* non-representational. Now I'm not saying the distinction between representational and non-representational art doesn't exist, or isn't worth sustaining in the case of Kandinsky. But I also think there's a limit. Kandinsky's forms of circle and triangle one sees whenever one does geometry. Likewise, if you take a Platonism view of mathematics, then Kandinsky is, in a very literal way, extracting the beauty of the Forms.
Something like Duchamp's *Fountain* (aka the R. Mutt urinal) is much more radically nonrepresentational.
Unfortunately, he soon goes off the rails:
> In a certain sense, the tableau "Circle-Triangle" is even more real and complete, which is to say more concrete, than the real tree. In fact the tree is not uniquely in itself, for itself, by itself; it is on Earth, under the sky, alongside other things...
One is screaming at this point "so is art!" Art does not exist by itself, in itself and for itself. Even in its abstractions it is grounded by the mind and therefore broader society that made it. There is plenty of art that I find worthwhile that isn't "beautiful." Not even just *traditionally* beautiful, but beautiful in any sense of the term. The horribly awe-inspiring or disgusting can be good art, and if this is "beautiful" then I question the usage of the word "beautiful.
It's not that Kojève's view is *incoherent*, I just don't think it's the best tool for the job. Compare and contrast Iris Murdoch's view of art and morality:
Murdoch uses art as an intuition pump for morality, so she has a somewhat unified view of axiology, which is a kind of non-naturalism based on the transcendental nature of the Good. Murdoch uses Plato's metaphor of the sun from his allegory of the cave: The Good illuminates everything, it is what allows one to make decisions and get a grasp on things. But one cannot look directly at it: any attempt to pin it down and it dissolves in your hands. Whenever one tries to limit the Good to one finite thing, several problems arise.
First, one can always imagine a *better X*, an X that is somehow beyond what is actually properly incarnatable.
Second, by trying to limit the Good to a particular sphere, one ends up simply defining a *Good X*, rather than *The Good*.
And third and most catastrophically, to actually explain what the Good is in a particular situation, one inevitably ends up having to use examples from other fields as metaphors to explain what one means.
Given that one cannot grasp the Good as such, to properly interact with Good Things, to figure out which things *are* Good (or better/worse), one needs to openly and honestly sit with the thing. One must sit with it, turn it over, learn its properties and the properties of alternatives. One must surrender one's pre-judgements and what makes one comfortable, and really "surrender to the life of the object," to use Hegel's phrasing. Only then can one make a truly right decision, rather than a rushed, surface-level one.
This, I think, says something far more useful and meaningful about art than Kojève: Good art takes work, it takes thought and conversation. It *means something*, teaches us about ourselves and the world, and pulls us out of our everyday anxieties and self-centeredness in order to *appreciate and surrender to the Other.*
But as much as I dislike Kojève's view, it would be wrong to completely discard it: it would be utterly ridiculous to say that beauty is irrelevant to art. There is plenty of art that is simply beautiful and is valuable on that basis. It would be utterly exhausting if every piece of art said something deep and powerful to the human condition. Sometimes what you need is simply a good time. At the same time though, truly Great Art must be memorable, and not merely on the level of form. It must reveal something, teach us something, force us to go beyond ourselves and be stunned in awe, to "surrender to the life of the object."
Thus, maybe a typology like this is closer to the truth:
March 29, 2023
Great.
July 4, 2023
A curiosity for Kojeve completists.
February 25, 2024
"The history of an individual artist’s oeuvre applies to the history of painting as a whole"
June 25, 2024
Formidably indigestible short essay combining highly abstract Heglianism with an early excursus into Jacques-Jacques Liverot style breast theory.
July 22, 2025
i enjoyed reading this but I do not necessarily agree with all the ideas brought up, though I found it to interesting to think about these ideas. lots of repetition
August 10, 2025
gorgeous, will change the way i think about representational vs. nonrepresentational art
January 17, 2023
kojeve propone reconceptulizar el arte abstracto como arte concreto, muy fino
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews