A groundbreaking exhibition at Paris's Philharmonic Music Museum invites visitors to experience the work of abstract art pioneer Wassily Kandinsky through an immersive musical journey. "Kandinsky: The Music of Colors," running from October 15, 2025, to February 1, 2026, presents nearly 200 works and objects created in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, exploring the profound connection between visual art and music that defined the Russian painter's revolutionary approach.
The exhibition begins in an unexpected way for a show centered on painting – the first room contains no artwork at all. Instead, visitors are equipped with essential headphones that fill their ears with the deep, resonant notes of the prelude from Richard Wagner's opera "Lohengrin." Surrounded by costumes and stage designs from the German composer's opera, visitors experience what Kandinsky described as his first "aesthetic shock" – the transformative encounter with Wagner's music that would reshape his entire artistic vision.
Born in 1866 into a bourgeois merchant family in Moscow, Wassily Kandinsky grew up immersed in music and culture. He learned music theory, piano, cello, and drawing from an early age, following a law degree at Moscow University with plans to become a lawyer. However, in 1896, he made the dramatic decision to abandon his legal career and dedicate himself entirely to painting. This pivotal moment came after two simultaneous revelations: discovering the abstraction in Claude Monet's "Haystacks" series and experiencing the visual imagery that Wagner's operatic music evoked in his mind. Kandinsky wrote in his memoirs that these encounters in 1895 revealed to him the "spiritual" power of art, leading to his life-changing epiphany that he would become a painter.
The exhibition traces Kandinsky's gradual journey toward abstraction, showing how he continued painting until just months before his death in 1944 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. His early works, inspired by music and Russian folk festivals, depicted recognizable scenes with increasing ambiguity and mystery. Visitors witness the evolution as his paintings transform from identifiable subjects into visual puzzles and suppositions. A horse might maintain its vague form, but why is it painted blue? This progression illustrates Kandinsky's growing belief that art should transcend literal representation.
"Kandinsky paints like a musician," explains Marie-Pauline Martin, director of the Philharmonic's Music Museum and co-curator of the exhibition. "Music is an imaginative force, an intellectual model that never imitates nature. Whether you listen to pop music or a symphony, you don't see a specific portrait or precise landscape. Music doesn't function through imitation of nature, but through the pure expressiveness of sounds." Drawing from his musical education and passion, Kandinsky quickly grasped this concept, believing that music's universal appeal stemmed from its abstract language that could speak directly to the soul.
Kandinsky adopted musical terminology for his artistic vocabulary, titling his canvases "Composition," "Movement," and "Improvisation." As Martin notes, "He set aside centuries of realistic, naturalistic painting that sought its motifs in nature. He declared: 'I will work like a musician with a symphony. I work only with colors, only with forms, only with lines.'" This revolutionary approach positioned him as a pioneer who understood that "art is not a question of form, but of artistic content."
The exhibition showcases not only Kandinsky's works but also pieces by his friends and students from his teaching years at the Bauhaus in Berlin. Among his circle were fellow painters and musicians, including Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg. In 1911, Kandinsky experienced another profound emotional and aesthetic shock at a Schoenberg concert in Vienna, calling him "the best of contemporary music." This admiration sparked a twenty-year correspondence between the two artists, with Kandinsky encouraging Schoenberg to express himself through painting. The exhibition dedicates significant space to this collaboration, illustrating the deep interconnection between the two art forms in Kandinsky's philosophy.
Deeply embedded in his era's artistic movements, Kandinsky traveled extensively, taught, wrote theoretical works, and created collaborative projects with other artists, continuously pushing the boundaries of abstraction until his paintings became pure color and form – sometimes purely geometric shapes. Convinced of the interconnectedness of all arts, he envisioned creating an almanac in the 1920s that would compile all art forms reflecting each year's creative output, from Japanese prints to children's drawings. Although World War II prevented this ambitious project's completion, the exhibition presents the first publication, which aimed to demonstrate, as Kandinsky wrote, "once and for all, that all forms of art nurture the same spiritual aspirations" and that "art is not a question of form but of artistic content."
Martin encourages visitors to experience the exhibition like listening to a symphony – by allowing themselves to be carried away by art's inherent beauty. Rather than intellectualizing what appears before their eyes, she suggests that simply looking is sufficient. "We've over-intellectualized Kandinsky and abstract art," Martin explains, inviting visitors to lose themselves in color. "It's just about appreciating the science of color. He invented an entire science of colors. But actually, it's very emotional."
Color serves as the exhibition's guide, drawing visitors hypnotically from canvas to canvas like a composer skillfully arranging chord progressions to create music. Kandinsky painted his canvases with meticulous care and reflection, fulfilling his stated goal: to "paint good, necessary, and living paintings." Nothing more, nothing less. The exhibition demonstrates how this modest ambition revolutionized the art world and continues to inspire viewers to experience painting as a form of visual music, where color and form speak directly to human emotion and spirituality.
