A groundbreaking exhibition at the Philharmonie de Paris offers an unprecedented exploration of the profound connection between music and visual art in the work of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), the father of abstract painting. The exhibition, titled "Kandinsky, The Music of Colors," reveals how the Russian artist's synesthetic perception of sound and color fundamentally shaped his revolutionary approach to art.
For Kandinsky, colors possessed distinct sonic qualities that guided his artistic vision. Yellow, he believed, sounded like a trumpet played in high notes with increasing intensity, or the brilliant sound of a fanfare. This deep conviction about the equivalence between color and sound, which extended to every hue in the light spectrum, became the first step in his triumphant march toward abstract art, as the exhibition demonstrates.
Kandinsky's unique perception developed from his privileged upbringing in a cultured family in Moscow and later Odessa, where artistic education was central to daily life. Piano and cello lessons, along with regular chamber music practice, formed the foundation of his musical knowledge. However, two pivotal events in Moscow in 1896 would reveal a particular trait of his psyche that would forever change the course of art history.
The first revelation came during an exhibition devoted to Impressionist painters, where Kandinsky discovered Claude Monet's "Haystacks" series. This encounter was transformative, as he suddenly perceived that mimetic representation of nature was not a necessity in art, and that the force and rhythm of color could transmit the soul of things. "I wondered why the painter would not go beyond Monet and paint freely, without any constraint from the object? This is what composers do when they compose the most beautiful symphonies or the most beautiful quartets with notes," he would later write in "Reminiscences" in 1913.
The second theatrical moment was an astonishing sequence of events. While attending a performance of Richard Wagner's "Lohengrin" at the Bolshoi Theatre, Kandinsky was overwhelmed by the vision of a sunset illuminating Moscow. "The violins, the deep basses and especially the wind instruments then personified for me all the force of the twilight hours. I mentally saw all my colors, they were before my eyes. Wild lines, almost mad, were drawn before me," he recalled.
These experiences revealed that colors possessed timbre and lines had rhythm. Kandinsky understood that he needed to construct a visual language that could be evoked by music. Marie-Pauline Martin, co-curator with Angela Lampe of the Philharmonie de Paris exhibition, emphasizes: "Kandinsky understood better than any artist what music could do for painting. It was an exemplary value for him, a model for the objective that interested him: how to say things without copying reality." From that moment forward, the object would never again be a constraint, and Kandinsky launched a bridge between Impressionism and abstraction.
While Wagner and his dramatic power served as both trigger and revealer, Kandinsky's musical horizons would continue to expand throughout his life. He was an informed music lover who frequented the opera, concert halls, and musical evenings, developing genuine friendships with composers. Russian musical schools formed the cradle of this culture, tinged with romanticism and mysticism. His record collection included a significant number of Orthodox choir recordings, and Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881), profoundly Slavic in character, was one of his favorite musicians, well before he became enthusiastic about serialism and dodecaphony.
In 1928, while a member of the Bauhaus in Dessau, Kandinsky would conceive the scenario and sets for "Pictures at an Exhibition," his only theatrical work brought to the stage during his lifetime. Moscow, the starting point of his research and his "musical tuning fork," would remain his "spiritual homeland," and he would constantly return to the colorful richness of its folk art, the sonority of its bells, and the domes of its churches.
When he returned to Moscow in 1910 with his composer friend Thomas von Hartmann, Kandinsky became keenly interested in the work of avant-garde musicians, particularly Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915). While it's unknown whether the two men ever met, the painter shared with the pianist a fascination for the theme of the Apocalypse, "a Hymn to the new creation that follows destruction." In a 1910 Composition titled "All Saints," chaos explodes to the sound of an imposing trumpet, suggesting that a new world was possible, transformed by art and metamorphosed by synesthesia - the correspondence between the senses, specifically between sounds and colors.
The concept of synesthesia was not entirely new to Kandinsky. He was familiar with the method of a Russian musicologist "which allows one to see sounds and hear colors musically," as well as recent work in chromotherapy for nervous diseases. This neurological phenomenon, which affects many artists including Franz Liszt, Joan Mitchell, Paul Klee, David Hockney, Vladimir Nabokov, and possibly Arthur Rimbaud, involves the involuntary and automatic association of two or more senses. Nearly eighty types have been identified, from associating letters or numbers with colors to music with color, and even lexical-gustatory synesthesia, where a word triggers an immediate taste sensation.
Kandinsky, now both artist and theorist, placed this subject at the heart of his first book, "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" (1910), a prodigious synthesis of his reflections, written just as he had created his first abstract painting. "Color is a means of exerting a direct influence on the soul. Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with many strings," he wrote. For Kandinsky, all art was a question of inner vibration.
Kandinsky believed in the union of all arts, the "Gesamtkunstwerk" (total work of art) initiated by Wagner's project at Bayreuth and adopted by all aesthetic movements in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. From this unity should emerge a revolutionary monumental art. He participated in this vision as painter, brilliant theorist, poet, writer, and "scenic producer." In 1909, he launched the project of "Yellow Sound," a spectacle that would never be performed but constituted a stage on his road to abstraction, featuring anonymous characters, mobile and abstract sets, chromatic choreography, and words reduced to their sonic material.
In 1912, the final part of this scenic work was published in the famous Blue Rider almanac, a collection of texts that Kandinsky had proposed to Franz Marc (1880-1916) and his expressionist fellow students. All contributions supported Kandinsky's theory of "inner necessity," that unlimited resonance without imposed form that invests the work of art, whatever it may be. One solicited musician contributed one of his scores for publication, "Herzgewächse" opus 20. His name was Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), and he would become the most significant encounter of Kandinsky's life.
Their correspondence reveals how similar their conception of art was. Non-figurative painting and atonal music converged in their thinking. Both had long believed that there was no opposition between concord and discord, that no dissonance was ugly, and that "every consonance is beautiful when it proceeds from inner necessity." "Here begins the music of the future," exclaimed Kandinsky after hearing Schoenberg's string quartets in January 1911 in Munich, just before painting "Impression III (Concert)," part of a series begun in 1909. His painting had found its system and complete liberation.
Until 1914, Kandinsky would paint thirty-five of these Improvisations, which he described as expressions of his inner nature. However, there was no chance in their construction, which was regulated like a musical score. No color was random; all responded to an injunction of the soul. After a "Fugue" (1914), an homage to Bach's counterpoint, ten Compositions would follow until 1939, marking the completion of his conquest of abstraction. From then on, as he prophesied, "the work is born entirely from the artist, as has been the case for music for centuries. From this point of view, painting has rejoined music and both have an increasingly strong tendency to create absolute works, like autonomous beings."
The exhibition "Kandinsky, The Music of Colors" runs at the Philharmonie de Paris from October 15 to February 1, offering visitors an immersive experience into the synesthetic world of one of art history's most revolutionary figures. Through paintings, sketches, musical scores, and multimedia presentations, the exhibition demonstrates how Kandinsky's musical sensibilities fundamentally transformed not only his own artistic practice but the entire trajectory of modern art.
