Wassily Kandinsky
He quit law at 30 to paint, and heard colors as instruments: yellow a trumpet, deep blue an organ.
- Lived
- 1866–1944
- Color book
- Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911
- Bauhaus
- Taught 1922–1933
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) gave up teaching law in Moscow at 30 to study painting in Munich. Before he left, in 1896, he saw one of Monet's haystacks and couldn't tell what it showed, only that the color gripped him. Wagner's Lohengrin moved him the same way; he wrote that he “saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes.”
In Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) he argued that colors act on the soul like sounds. Keen lemon yellow hurts the eye like a shrill trumpet; light blue is a flute, darker blue a cello, the darkest blue an organ; green is the calm middle notes of a violin; vermilion has the charm of flame. “Blue is the typical heavenly colour,” he wrote, and yellow the typically earthly one.
Whether he was a synesthete in the clinical sense is debated (synesthesia), but he built his art on the musical analogy, naming paintings 'Improvisations' and 'Compositions'. Composition VII (1913) is often counted among the high points of early abstract painting. From 1922 to 1933 he taught at the Bauhaus, pairing sharp yellow with the triangle and deep blue with the circle.
His color meanings are personal and poetic, not science (see color psychology). But the idea that color can stand on its own, free of objects the way music is free of words, changed modern art, and it began with a haystack he couldn't recognize.
Swatches
- Lemon yellow · shrill trumpet
- Light blue · flute
- Darker blue · cello
- Darkest blue · organ
- Green · calm violin
- Vermilion · flame
Colors
Sources
- Kandinsky, W. (1911). Über das Geistige in der Kunst; trans. M. Sadleir (1914), Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
- Kandinsky, W. (1913). Rückblicke (Reminiscences). Berlin: Der Sturm.
- Wikipedia, 'Wassily Kandinsky'.
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