Warburg, Kandinsky, and Shestov on Renewal of Art Humanity: Artistic, Philosophical, Psychoanalytic Perspectives

Comparative reading of the three contemporaries’ thoughts on the nature and power of artistic image and the function of art in societal life This monograph analyses the thoughts of the three thinkers in dialogue with Freud’s analytic observations and those of other Freudian analysts, and with reference to the ideas of such scholars of the Western intellectual tradition.Three outstanding figures of Freud’s century, art historian Aby Warburg, philosopher Lev Shestov and painter Wassily Kandinsky shared a vision of art as ‘the journey of the mind’ and made efforts to restore a connection with the primal and unsullied roots of art. Based on my research in the Warburg Library, the Library and Special Collections of the British Psychoanalytic Society at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and the study of Warburg’s and Shestov’s archival materials, the monograph is a comparative reading of the three contemporaries’ thoughts on the nature and power of artistic image and the function of art in societal life. By engaging Freud’s and other analysts’ insights into art with those of Warburg, Shestov and Kandinsky, the interdisciplinary study of the theme of the renewal evokes interconnections between philosophical, artistic and psychoanalytic perspectives.