Abstract

From the turn of the century onwards, Wassily Kandinsky accompanied his pictorial work with theoretical and terminological reflection. It had its origins in readings of classical art treatises in Munich at the turn of the century. According to Kandinsky, the problem was mainly related to the lack of precision in the terminology used in the writings on painting. To resolve this, he turned to music theory and began to study counterpoint theory in particular. For Kandinsky, the development of a terminology was the prerequisite for building a theory that would be a true science of painting. In the post-revolutionary context, his terminology project became topical and interacted with other terminology and encyclopedic projects that had emerged in other circles. While David Shterenberg and artists from the radical left advocated a sociological approach and research based on art materials, Kandinsky’s project, rooted in centuries-old artistic tradition, entered into dialogue with the project conceived by Ivan Zholtovskii for architecture and one by Evsei Shor, that was open to philosophical aesthetics. We argue that at the origin of this project, the encyclopedic ambition belonged to the philosophers, while the terminological research was desired mainly by representatives of the visual arts, who were dissatisfied with the state of terminology in art theory.