Wassily kandinskyand arnold schoenberg: the anticipation of postmodernity in arts

The aim of the article is a comparative analysis of the principles of abstract painting and atonal music as an anticipation of postmodernity in arts, which is understood as an appropriate response to the severe crisis of modernity. It is indicated that the striking resemblance of the ideas of Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg was caused by structural changes in the European metaphysics of subjectivity, the cause of which was the approaching postmodernity. The transition from modernity to postmodernity is seen as the destruction of all centered and closed integrity which followed the model of metaphysics, and thereupon required invention of new types of ordering. It is emphasized that atonal music is based on the assumption of the absence of tonic and equality of twelve tones of chromatic scale organized in the series. As a result, its structure reproduces the outcome of the destruction of metaphysics at another level of culture and through dissimilar symbols. The rejection of the norms of linear perspective as the basis of representationalism in painting and the subsequent denial of the principles of compatibility and order of colors in Kandinsky’s concept of abstract art of means the destruction of the same deep structure. This destruction affected, first of all, the position of the self-asserting subject as the pinnacle of the metaphysics of modernity, and also caused the failure of mechanisms generating and maintaining the confidence of modernity in its universality and eternity, which seemed to follow from its unique metaphysical foundations.