{"id":240691,"date":"2025-10-26T05:15:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-26T05:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/240691\/"},"modified":"2025-10-26T05:15:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-26T05:15:12","slug":"the-key-to-kandinsky-listen-to-his-paintings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/240691\/","title":{"rendered":"The key to Kandinsky? Listen to his paintings"},"content":{"rendered":"

A green horse, a red sky, a forest of blue trees. Born of the same century that gave us Marcel Duchamp\u2019s urinal and Tracey Emin\u2019s unmade bed, it seems quaint to think much of this little subversion of colour. And yet, when Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky painted \u201cImprovisation 3\u201d in 1909, it marked a revolutionary moment in art history. No longer would the representation of reality dominate; now, form, lines and above all colour would be employed to describe our inner emotions. Kandinsky pioneered abstract painting that would shape modern art, but how did he do it? In a word: music.<\/p>\n

That artists of all kinds are inspired by their forebears is both logical and commonplace. Less obvious are the inspirations that cross disciplines. In 1896, Kandinsky went to the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, the city where he was born, to hear the opera Lohengrin by Richard Wagner, and his life was never the same. \u201cI saw all my colours in my mind; they stood before my eyes,\u201d Kandinsky wrote of the experience in his 1911 book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. \u201cWild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me. I did not dare use the expression that Wagner had painted \u2018my hour\u2019 musically.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kandinsky had wanted to break with form in his art, only he had been unsure how to do it. Now, he began to see a connection between music and colour, and from that moment on, Kandinsky, a trained lawyer until he fully turned to painting at age 30, would begin to move away from the figurative painting of his early work.<\/p>\n

Kandinsky: The Music of Colours, a major collaboration between the Centre Pompidou and the Philharmonie de Paris, explores this intimate dialogue between music and Kandinsky\u2019s canvases, and in doing so, traces the birth of abstract art itself. Upon entering the show at the Philharmonie, visitors are handed headphones, immersing them in a soundscape that accompanies their journey through the exhibition. Each room marks a chapter in Kandinsky\u2019s evolution towards abstraction, pairing pivotal paintings with a piece of music thought to have inspired their creation.<\/p>\n

In one of the first rooms \u2014 titled \u201cImprovisations\u201d \u2014 devoted to Kandinsky\u2019s early experiments in freeing colour, we hear the music of Arnold Schoenberg. His Trois pi\u00e8ces pour piano, one of Schoenberg\u2019s first atonal works, introduces a composer who would become one of Kandinsky\u2019s most important artistic influences. Kandinsky described Schoenberg as being \u201calmost alone in severing himself from conventional beauty\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009Today\u2019s dissonance in painting and music is merely the consonance of tomorrow.\u201d This insight \u2014 that music, and by extension painting, need not conform to traditional notions of beauty but could instead be expressive, radical and new \u2014 became a cornerstone of Kandinsky\u2019s vision,\u00a0mirroring his own search to liberate colour from representation.<\/p>\n

To see painting beside music, as this exhibition insists we do, is to grasp what they share: rhythm, tone, structure, emotion, abstraction<\/p>\n

From there, the path leads to rooms including \u201cThe Apocalypse as a Total Work of Art\u201d, where we hear Alexander Scriabin\u2019s Poem of Ecstasy, a hymn to the creative spirit\u2019s awakening to divine consciousness, and see works including Kandinsky\u2019s \u201cEtude for Composition VII\u201d (1913) and \u201cToussaint\u201d (1910). Later, in the room devoted to his theatrical experiments, in which Kandinsky attempted to give abstraction a stage, it is Modest Mussorgsky\u2019s Pictures at an Exhibition that accompanies us round. The music recalls Kandinsky\u2019s own ventures into scenography, his dream of a \u201ctotal artwork\u201d in which sound, colour, and movement might finally merge.<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018Models for the music room created for the German Architect Exhibition in Berlin\u2019 (1931) <\/p>\n

\u201cFor Kandinsky, music was a way to understand abstract art. It encouraged him to go beyond figurative art,\u201d says Angela Lampe, a curator of the exhibition. \u201cMusic was a model for art and an analogy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why does it matter that this exhibition draws music into the frame? Because it reminds us that comparison is more than a critical exercise: it\u2019s a creative one, too. While we like to sort the arts into neat, self-contained categories \u2014 painting, music, poetry, photography \u2014 they are not as isolated as we often assume. These divisions are convenient, even necessary, for understanding the particularities of each form, but they can also mislead us. By understanding each art form through difference, we risk forgetting how profoundly interconnected they are; one medium can echo, translate, or even complete another.<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018Yellow-Red-Blue\u2019 (1925) \u00a9 Centre Pompidou\"VassilyKandinsky and a friend playing musical instruments in 1886 \u00a9 Centre Pompidou<\/p>\n

To see painting beside music, as this exhibition insists we do, is to grasp what they share: rhythm, tone, structure, emotion, abstraction. Each art form has its own language, but those languages are mutually intelligible. Kandinsky understood this. For him, colour could sound, and sound could take form.<\/p>\n

Kandinsky often described seeing colours when he heard tones, linking specific timbres to particular hues: the trumpet was yellow, the tuba red, the mid-range violin green. Whether he truly had synaesthesia in the clinical sense is uncertain \u2014 historians base the idea on his autobiographical writings, not a scientific diagnosis \u2014 but his accounts suggest that sound and colour were intimately bound. One of this exhibition\u2019s greatest triumphs is how it lets visitors experience this for themselves. As Lampe explains: \u201cThe soundtrack to the exhibition is an interpretation. We have his record collection as hints and some quotes and texts, but we know he never painted music directly. There\u2019s a quote from 1913 where Kandinsky said as much: \u2018I don\u2019t paint music.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The room \u201cFugue\u201d brings this dialogue between music and painting to life. Kandinsky\u2019s works hang alongside those of contemporaries, including Auguste Macke\u2019s\u00a0\u201cColoured Composition (Homage to Johann Sebastian Bach)\u201d (1912), where the fugue form becomes visible in the way blocks of colour repeat, overlap and interact. More striking still is Paul Klee\u2019s \u201cFugue in Red\u201d (1921). This features multiple distinct shapes, their shared orientation and movement across the canvas creating the impression of a unified, flowing musical line, echoing the six-voice structure of Bach\u2019s The Musical Offering, orchestrated by Anton Webern, heard through the headphones. This room demonstrates how Kandinsky\u2019s ideas were part of a broader artistic conversation; he was not working in isolation, but in constant dialogue with peers who were also exploring abstraction and the interplay of form, colour and rhythm. Throughout his career, Kandinsky drew directly on musical language to title his works: Improvisations, Compositions, Impressions, even Lied, the German word for \u201csong\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"AnKandinsky\u2019s \u2018Composition IX\u2019 (1936) \u00a9 Centre Pompidou<\/p>\n

All the milestones the exhibition traces \u2014 The Blue Rider Almanac (1912) which united artists and composers around spiritual abstraction; the Bauhaus years (1922-3), where he formalised a visual grammar of abstraction \u2014 build towards the final room. \u201cCompositions\u201d features three of Kandinsky\u2019s important late works: \u201cComposition VIII\u201d (1923),\u00a0\u201cComposition IX\u201d (1936)\u00a0and \u201cComposition X\u201d (1939). With their biomorphic forms and vibrant colours, these paintings achieve autonomous, musical intensity, confirming that the artist had succeeded in ushering the medium into a new, modern era.<\/p>\n

Recommended<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/a><\/p>\n

By foregrounding the influence of music on Kandinsky\u2019s art, the exhibition reveals how ideas and movements often flourish through dialogue across disciplines and perspectives. It\u2019s a poignant idea in our fractured world, an aspirational model for navigating uncertainty and, perhaps, bringing about new ways of thinking. Progress of all kinds, Kandinsky\u2019s work shows us, depends on those not only with a vision wide enough to see what\u2019s on the horizon, but also the imagination to dream up what might lie beyond it.<\/p>\n

To February 1, philharmoniedeparis.fr<\/a><\/p>\n

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