Kandinsky


	Return to Gesamtkunstwerk


	Return to Home


	Return to Music & Color

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944)

Russian born, Kandinsky moved to Munich, Germany as a young man to pursue his artistic career. But after the start of World War I he was persecuted as an enemy of Germany and had to flee back to Russia. He returned to Germany when the war was over, but only had to flee again when the Nazis came to power.

Many of his paintings were destroyed by the Nazis including several from his famous Composition series. In 1933 he moved to Neuilly, France, near Paris where he worked up unto his death in 1944 on his painting and theoretical writings. Like Mondrian, Kandinsky’s art reflected the turbulence in Europe during the early years of the 20th century and the shift from Impressionism to Expressionism. Nevertheless, perhaps as a way to combat the dark forces in the world around him, he focused on pure forms and developed many theories on the nature of beauty and harmony in color. Kandinsky was one of the first creators of pure abstraction in painting.


	An accomplished musician as well, Kandinsky once said ;

		“Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another to cause vibrations in the soul.”


	Click on Picture to Return



		Colour Studies

Following in the tradition of a long line of theorists relating color and harmony going back to Goethe and Newton, Kandinsky used color in a highly theoretical way. He associated tone with timbre (the sound's character), hue with pitch, and saturation with the volume of sound. He even claimed that when he saw color he heard music. It is not known if he was speaking figuratively, or if he may have actually suffered from a mental condition known as ‘synesthesia’ where two or more of our physical senses are coupled in a much more heightened state than normal. (click synesthesia for more information.)


	Read about two of Kandinsky’s books here => “Point and Line to Plane” and “Concerning the Spititual in Art”


		The piece below at left shows that even in Kandinsky’s early impressionistic works, he already had a deep appreciation for color.


			Murnau - Kohlgruberstrasse - 1908




	Harmonie Tranquille - 1924


	Kandinsky was not fond of the color black. Of it he said; “Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.” So it is somewhat ironic that his last major work (see below) painted six years before his own death, was cast against a black background.


	Composition X - 1939