“A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his art.,
These are the words of the painter Wassily Kandinsky, and they describe how music shaped his work throughout his life. Music appears everywhere in his paintings. Kandinsky believed that music could be brought to the canvas the way it can be set on paper as notes, and finally turned into sound that reaches almost every living being.
“The sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with base notes or dark lake with the treble.,
Another of Kandinsky’s quotes shows us where the artist got much of his inspiration. He was not the first to work this way. The Pythagoreans were probably the first to blur the line between the musical and the visual when they claimed that “the eyes are made for astronomy, the ears for harmony, and these are sister sciences.,
Kandinsky went on refining his theory. Abstract art creates a new inner world that, seen from the outside, has nothing to do with reality. It follows the general laws of the cosmic world. Kandinsky never doubted his ‘inner world’, from his earliest years until his death.
The blending of music with painted or written art grew more common as human creativity developed over time. Study this for a moment and you meet famous names like Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who once called architecture “frozen music, , or as Paul Klee famously put it, “One day I must be able to improvise freely on the keyboard of colors: the row of watercolors in my paintbox, .
Or like Paul Klee, who drew great inspiration from music, as the title of one of his paintings shows: Harmony in Blue-Orange, 1923. The pull of sound can be felt everywhere in Kandinsky’s work.
Before we understand the art, though, we should understand the man. Who was Wassily Kandinsky, and why did music matter so much to him? The Russian painter is known as one of the pioneers of abstract painting and abstract expressionism. Through his pictures and his theoretical writing, he shaped the development of modern art.
Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866. In his early years he learned to play piano and cello, and music stayed with his art for the rest of his life. He studied economic policy in Moscow and worked there as a lecturer at the university.
After visiting a French Impressionist exhibition in 1895, Kandinsky decided to become a painter. He moved to Munich and learned the basic techniques of painting. He studied the Impressionist style and Art Nouveau, and he gave particular attention to the works of Franz von Stuck.
“Without expression and boring!,
Kandinsky painted his first pictures in the Impressionist style, but soon his manner shifted toward the abstract. His interest in “fantastic motifs, comes through clearly in the paintings of this period. Yet he grew more and more dissatisfied with the style and expression of his Munich years. To him, they felt expressionless and dull.
Between 1900 and 1910 Kandinsky traveled widely. In Paris he met the French artist Paul Gauguin, and through him he became acquainted with neo-expressionism and Fauvism. He traveled to Germany and founded the artist group Phalanx, where he met the expressionist Gabriele Muenter, whom he married a short time later. That marriage lasted until 1916.
Between 1908 and 1914 he wrote five stage compositions: The Green Sound (1909), Black and White (1909), Black Figure (1909) and Yellow Sound (1912), which are considered forerunners of Expressionist drama.
It was in Vienna, though, that Kandinsky formed his most singular friendship, with the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Hearing one of his concerts, Kandinsky felt he had met a brother-in-arms. The two men set out on a long and often sharply critical friendship that would break down the walls between music and painting.
Kandinsky and Schoenberg linked pictorial sequences by association and deliberately set the elements of color-form, text, space-sound, and movement on equal footing. This balance of the different parameters shows that these stage works are not dramas in the usual sense. They keep to lyrical passages, so the word is used in places as pure sound. At the same time, in Schoenberg’s libretti, color was freed against sound. Colors, shapes, and sounds came to the foreground and, like language, were released from any duty to imitate reality. And all of this without the help of modern lighting.
Kandinsky had to leave Germany at the start of the First World War as an enemy alien, so he returned to Moscow. In the early years of Soviet Russia, as it was then called, he worked in a leading role in the People’s Commissariat for Education and built up art schools and museums.
After the war, in 1922, on a business trip to Germany, he accepted an invitation to the young Bauhaus in the Weimar Republic. A second productive period began then, and it ended with the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933 and his second expulsion from Germany.
At the Bauhaus, Kandinsky showed how much music shaped his art. He did not actually teach painting there but focused on the analysis of pictorial elements. In his pictures he opened the way for arranging those elements into composition, as his 1926 book ‘Point and Line to Plane’ shows. He set out his theory in a language of its own, where the geometrical, the physical, the aesthetic and the spiritual sat together naturally.
A Visual Image of ‘Colorful Sound’
You can see this clearly in Kandinsky’s ‘Yellow-Red-Blue,’ 1925 / oil on canvas; 128 x 201.5cm, on display at the Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris.
The image splits into two areas: light to dark colors move from left to right, fusing into strongly outlined color fields. Yellow tones dominate the left. At the center is the rectangle in a slightly clouded lemon yellow. Next to it, orange, ocher and brown shades form the transition to the darker part of the canvas. The transparent violet structure recalls a crescent moon and leads across to the blue circle, which is darkened mostly with black.
In the darker part of the picture there are also larger black shapes: a black circle, a black stick with four flags, two strokes with three passing bows, and lure-like formations.
A gray square sits between these different color worlds. A checkerboard-patterned quadrangle stands out from the gray square, seemingly at random. Yellow-gray clouds hold all the graphic objects in the right half of the picture, with a violet-white cloud band along the bottom. On the left and top you can see violet-white and dirty yellow clouds. The rest of the painting is filled with bright sky blue. Above a yellow-black rimmed gray sun, the sky seems to reach past the edge of the picture.
Kandinsky brings the colors and their forms to life. They behave like independent creatures and even feel emotions. His idea of the abstract in fine art is unlike the work of other abstract artists. A distinct movement, depth, and dimension mark his abstract images, and his style has influenced many artists since.
A final phase of work begun in Paris
During his time in Paris, Kandinsky changed his manner of painting. He no longer worked from a combination of primary colors, and his pictures grew brighter, a response to the ‘soft light’, as he called it, with biomorphic forms in place of the geometrically strict images of the Dessau Bauhaus years. Composition IX, painted in 1936, is a good example.
Kandinsky referred to this period of his work as the ‘fairy tale themes’.
Short of materials during the Second World War, he had to make his work smaller, to the point of painting with gouache on cardboard. Again the public and his colleagues rejected his art. It was a world of figures, in which abstraction was not an end in itself and the language of forms was not ‘stillborn’, as he put it, but coming out full of vitality.
Kandinsky kept to his form until he died in 1944, three days before his 78th birthday. Few artists of the 20th century hold a presence like his. His art does not age, and it moves in and out of the world of music.
