Wassily (Vasily) Kandinsky

Christie Rose
Oct 22
2 min read

Updated: Nov 2

Where/when:

Russian, 1866 - 1944

Medium(s):

Watercolor
Gauche
Crayon

Impact:

For Kandinsky, colour meant more than just a visual component of a picture. Colour is its soul. In his books, he described his own perspective on how colours interacted with each other and with the spectator in detail and very poetically. Moreover, Kandinsky was a synaesthete, i.e. he could ‘hear colours’ and ‘see sounds.’- wassilykandinsky.net

"Colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the strings.The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul."

-Wassily Kandinsky

"Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art."

When Russian-born artist Vasily Kandinsky first heard a performance of Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin (premiered 1850) as a young man, he was moved by the powerful imagery the music evoked in his mind.

“The violins, the deep tones of the basses, and especially the wind instruments at that time embodied for me all the power of that pre-nocturnal hour,” Kandinsky later recollected in his 1911 book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. “I saw all my colors in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me. I did not dare use the expression that Wagner had painted ‘my hour’ musically.”

The visual symphony Kandinsky experienced may have been the result of a rare neurological phenomenon known as synesthesia.

https://www.guggenheim.org/articles/checklist/synesthesia-a-visual-symphony-art-at-the-intersection-of-sight-and-sound

Project/activities:

Listen to Around the Circles and have students paint/create work based on how the music feels
Alternatively, you could have students divide their papers into sections and play clips from different songs they might know and have them create work based on the music. After the work is complete you can have a turn and talk for the students to discuss what parts of the songs stuck out to them or what made them chose the colors, shapes, or lines that they included in their piece.