 For the painter, then, the choice of a color is determined by its emotional power. It is not the world that is painted, but, in a sense, emotion itself. This applies to abstract painting, which obviously does not represent any worldly object, but it also applies to any other form of painting. A painting that would be a simple copy of what has been seen in the world would be utterly “insignificant”. As Henry’s example of a painting from the Quattrocento illustrates, even figurative painting—in this case a representation of the Adoration of the Magi—chooses its colors according to their emotional power, not according to a “realistic” representation. Thus, while providing a theoretical basis for abstract painting, it is in fact a theory of painting as such that Kandinsky provides. For such a theory, forms are, very much like colors, not entities exterior to life but the expression of a force (K 123). Kandinsky’s theory of forms—referring to point, plane and line as their basic elements—therefore amounts to a theory of forces that inhabit not the world but our body as it is subjectively lived through (K 82). Such is the essence of Kandinsky’s theory of painting: to be a visible composition that both expresses and touches living interiority. Through this project, and as Kandinsky himself admits, painting has been ascribed the same purpose as music: to express “not the world […] but the Ground of Being and of Life” (“Dessiner la musique”, PHV III, 272).