Abstracting Empathy: Wassily Kandinsky and His Artistic Interpretations of Theories in Visual Perception

The proto-abstract works and budding philosophical theories of Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), produced between roughly 1896 and 1914, have traditionally been understood as consisting of studies relating to spirituality, the subconscious inner workings of the artist, and prolific experimentations with non-objective imagery. On the other hand, the connections between the artist’s development into his abstract style and the realm of the psychology of visual perception have been previously under-explored, especially the ways in which Einfühlungstheorie (empathy theory) connect to Kandinsky’s understanding of geometry and line. My intention in the present chapter is to pinpoint relationships between the theories on aesthetic empathy expressed by Kandinsky in connection with those espoused by the philosopher-psychologist Theodor Lipps (1851–1914), who, like Kandinsky, was working in and around Munich at the turn of the twentieth century.