Un astrattismo mancato?

Through an aesthetic and a historical-philological lens, this essay analyses the complex relationship between Wassily Kandinsky’s work and its critical interpretations by Carl Einstein and Clement Greenberg in the first half of the 20th century. Within two different and paradigmatic modernisms — the European and the North American one, the German-speaking and the English-speaking one —, both authors read Kandinsky’s abstraction both as a negative (in its deviation from modernist orthodoxy) and positive (a chance to project through Kandisky’s work an unprecedented image of modernism, as well as their critical vision) form of art.