The kingdom of the abstract

I've just begun reading an advance galley of Juliet Koss's Modernism After Wagner, which the always-excellent University of Minnesota is publishing, and came across a passage in the introduction about abstraction's early aspirations toward a universal language. She later ties this idea to theories of spectatorship (and, interestingly, cinema), but she starts with a terrific quote from Kandinsky, taken from his 1911 book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

The more abstract form is, the more clear and direct its appeal. The more an artist uses these abstract forms, the deeper and more confidently will he advance into the kingdom of the abstract. And after him will follow the viewer . . . who will also have gradually acquired a greater familiarity with the language of that kingdom.