Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

The Arts

Art As Sensation: Four Painters As Philosophers Of Art

Patricia Railing explains the philosophical ideas behind some of abstract art’s most famous abstractions.

There has been much philosophical speculation on the relationship between artistic materials and artistic experience down through the centuries. Christopher Perricone pointed this out in his article ‘Does the Philosophy of Art Have a Mind/Body Problem?’ back in Issue 46. Now it seems appropriate that several artists should be allowed to contribute to this debate. There were four early 20th century painters who wrote extensively on artistic materials, artistic experience and their relationship – the abstract and non-objective painters Vasily Kandinsky, Frank Kupka, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian.

In order to focus on the relationship between materials and the idea they embody, Kazimir Malevich wrote in 1915 that, in sculpting the David, Michelangelo had ruined a perfectly good piece of marble:

“The human form is not intrinsic in a block of marble.

…