A groundbreaking exhibition titled "Kandinsky: The Music of Colors" has opened at the Philharmonie de Paris, running until February 2026, offering visitors a comprehensive look at the total artistic research of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. Created in collaboration with the Centre Georges Pompidou, currently without a permanent home, this exhibition showcases the constant dialogue between Kandinsky and music, breathing life into the work of this pioneer of abstract art that has often been overly intellectualized.
The exhibition features approximately 200 paintings and sketches alongside a musical journey that tells the story of Kandinsky's artistic evolution. Kandinsky didn't become a painter until he was thirty years old, when he experienced a profound shock after discovering both Monet's paintings and Wagner's music. This dual revelation convinced him to pursue painting as a means to achieve total art – a quest that may seem obvious in 2025 when everything is transdisciplinary, but was revolutionary in the pre-war era.
Kandinsky's revolutionary approach led him to form the Blue Rider group, bringing together painters like Robert Delaunay, Paul Klee, and his friend Franz Marc, as well as composer Alexander Scriabin. His research toward abstraction wasn't merely in dialogue with music – which he actually practiced – but was inspired by it. This influence is evident in his major series with evocative titles: "Compositions" and "Improvisations." His artistic development accelerated when he met composer Arnold Schoenberg, who, like Kandinsky, worked across artistic boundaries by also painting.
The relationship between the two artists was deeply meaningful, as evidenced by their correspondence. Schoenberg wrote to Kandinsky: "You have realized in your works what I had, in an admittedly imprecise form, such a great desire for in music. And what I seek in a pictorial form." This mutual influence demonstrates the synesthetic ambitions that were central to Kandinsky's work – the phenomenon of associating senses, which was very strong in the painter who, for example, associated yellow with the sound of a trumpet.
One of the most interesting aspects of the exhibition focuses on Kandinsky's scenic projects, which are also among his most poorly preserved works. He wrote performances designed to make the principle of synesthesia tangible. His stage adaptation of Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," incorporating painting, sculptures, and performers, is reconstructed through an animated film created by pianist Mikhail Rudy. Another beautiful attempt to bring life through musical projection explores the research Kandinsky conducted after the war at the Bauhaus, where, invited by Walter Gropius, he worked on the graphic representation of musical language parameters and invented forms where natural signs and musical staves seem to suddenly dance before viewers.
The endeavor to explore the relationship between music and great painters of the 20th century has been attempted before with Paul Klee, Picasso, and Chagall. However, for Kandinsky, this musical perspective proves particularly fruitful because it liberates this pioneer of abstraction and his reflections on form and chromatism from the hyper-intellectual approach often taken toward his work. The exhibition succeeds in presenting Kandinsky's paintings as the "necessary and living" artworks he intended to create.
Despite its ambitious scope, the exhibition has some limitations stemming from the not entirely seamless marriage between the two organizing institutions. Visitors can sense more of Pompidou's influence than that of the Philharmonie, which has accustomed audiences to more immersive exhibitions. The result is somewhat disappointing as visitors find themselves in a typical "white cube" of classical modern art museum scenography. While the exhibition begins with an almost physical envelopment in Wagner's music, forcing visitors to navigate between projected images, the rest of the exhibition lacks sufficient musical presence, with selected excerpts being too brief. Greater risk-taking would have been welcomed – something that would more closely resemble the "necessary and living paintings" that Kandinsky sought to create.
