"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."
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Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009, p. 106
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Michel Henry
Michel Henry (10 January 1922 – 3 July 2002) was a French philosopher, phenomenologist and novelist. He wrote five novels and numerous philosophical works. He also lectured at universities in France, Belgium, the United States, and Japan.
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