ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the multifaceted relationship between French philosophy and painting by adding to aforementioned intellectuals the names of two neglected philosophers who published extensively on abstract painting: Michel Henry and Henri Maldiney. The concepts that Henry and Maldiney create to make the case for a post-phenomenological approach to abstract painting significantly differ. In numerous writings and interviews, Michel Henry often referred to his philosophy as a material phenomenology. Henry’s reflections on Kandinsky require a post-phenomenological discourse on abstraction that would both reinvent the notion of phenomenological reduction and rehabilitate the pathetic dimension of feeling. Even though Henry and Maldiney held divergent views on Kandinsky’s artistic legacy, one finds in their writings common concerns that make their work a fruitful site for comparative analysis. Notwithstanding this missed encounter between the two philosophers, one can certainly appreciate the remarkable connection they made between their post-phenomenological program, abstract painting and the aesthetic epochethat Kandinsky’s work of the early 1910s first revealed.
