Exploring Kandinsky: Synesthetic genius and father of Abstraction
- Bryleigh Pierce
- May 9
- 21 min read
Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) is often credited with making the single artistic breakthrough that led to total abstraction in art and the development of the Abstract movement which redefined what could be considered ‘art’ for the twentieth century. Unlike the history of other art movements, which were written by philosophers and historians in hindsight, Kandinsky himself wrote this narrative. But while the narrative of Kandinsky being the pioneer of Abstraction is undoubtedly false, this title belonging to Hilma af Klint and the Spiritualist nonrepresentational artists, other myths surrounding the artist that work to place him within art history’s favourite misunderstood genius paradigm cannot so easily be disproved – namely that of synesthesia being the driving force behind the development of his particular brand of Abstract art and his corresponding theories. Such a myth has the unique effect of transcending Kandinsky from an artist whose innate creativity compelled him to push the boundaries of art, into an artist so desperate to convey his experience to others and have them understand his view of the world that he created an entirely new movement and theory which allowed him the connection and understanding he craved.
Attempting to reconnect art with a higher, mystic purpose, Kandinsky advocated for “the proliferation of the spiritual movement” in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and argued the work of his predecessors and early twentieth century contemporaries to be “aimless, materialist art”, which was viewed by spectators who look for “‘closeness to nature,’ or ‘temperament’ or ‘handling,’ or ‘tonality,’ or ‘perspective,’ or what not”, and who ultimately favour that which appeals more to the eye and less to the soul.1 Art had, therefore, been stripped of its emotional substance and lost its soul. The new, nonrepresentational art was guided not by the materialist concerns of the old art, but by the spirit manifesting itself within art. Long before Kandinsky, the likes of af Klint, Anna Cassel, Georgiana Houghton, Sigrid Hjertén, Natalia Goncharova, Isaac Grünewald and many more. As such, in 1911 when Kandinsky first showed his nonrepresentational work at the Blaue Reiter Exhibition, there was no talk of him being the first or only to be doing such work or constructing such theories.
As art historian Julia Voss notes, Kandinsky was an ardent follower of Theosophy and engaged deeply with its writers and philosophers as much as he did his contemporary artists, and, on several occasions, witnessed séances and mediums drawing and painting their spiritual communicators, even selling their nonrepresentational works as postcards. “The nonrepresentational field”, Voss states, “was therefore not exactly new when Kandinsky entered it. But the history of abstraction had not yet been written – that was just starting to happen in the mid-thirties, in New York”.2
By way of explaining how the perception of art movements changes over time, Kandinsky constructed a pyramid that can be divided into three sections and wherein the pioneer artist sits alone in the top section, followers who come to understand him with time and extensive explanation sit in the middle section, and future generations of historians and artists, who revere and replicate the long since dead artist, sit in the largest segment at the bottom. As time progresses, the pyramid rises and the lone artist at the top, whose creativity drives him forward and onto new styles, is replaced by followers who now understand and replicate his art, and finally by historians and philosophers who theorise his art for a larger group of prosaic followers to come.3 When applied to the nonrepresentational art of Spiritualism, Kandinsky was in the second largest segment of the pyramid – a follower who was a little ahead of the general population in understanding the movement but by no means a pioneer. Although, by reframing himself and his work through the lens of Abstraction, he was later able to position himself at the top of the pyramid as a groundbreaking Abstract artist whose work could only be understood with time.
Sending his New York gallerist, Israel Ber Neumann, to Moscow to retrieve a vitally important 1911 artwork that was “rolled up somewhere” in his old studio, Kandinsky began this process of reframing, and his sudden urgency to find this artwork is due to his need for undisputable proof of its existence, because, he stated to Neumann, “It is truly the very first abstract painting in the world, as at that point not a single other painter was making abstract work”.4 While the work in question was, at the time, undated and Neumann was not provided any reference for what it looked like, it is commonly believed to have been either Composition IV or Composition V (both 1911) as these went on display just a few months after Concerning the Spiritual in Art was published, proving their existence thus allowed Kandinsky to argue that the work he was producing at the time of its publication was not Spiritualist, but early Abstract art.
Despite later asserting these to be the “very first abstract painting in the world”, as a follower of Theososphy he was well read on the subject of Spiritualism and was familiar with the nonrepresentational illustrations published in Annie Besant’s and Charles Webster Leadbeater’s seminal 1905 book, Thought-Forms, along with Austrian artist Katherine Schäffner’s abstract images published in 1908 by the art magazine, Der Kunstwart, wherein Ferdinand Avenarius referred to Schäffner’s images as “a new language”.5 Kandinsky was, therefore, well aware of his inability to start an artistic movement grounded in spiritual expression, a theory for which he attempted to lay the groundwork in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and that the history of both Theosophy and Spiritualist art had already been written with its pioneers and trailblazers clearly identified. Abstraction, however, was yet to be fully theorised when he sent Neumann to Moscow in the early 1930s, and by reframing his existing work as ‘abstract’ rather than ‘spiritual’ he created an opportunity to place himself at the top of the pyramid and the forefront of the movement. Concerning the Spiritual in Art, however, was published in 1911, almost 25 years before he saw such an opportunity, and he was therefore unable to reframe his ideas already published, placing them, and his art he attempts to theorise, well within the realm of Spiritualism rather than Abstraction as he would later claim.
Recalling a performance of Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, Kandinsky stated, “The violins, the deep bass tones, and, most especially, the wind instruments embodied for me then the whole impact of the hour of dusk. I saw all my colours in my mind’s eye. Wild, almost insane lines drew themselves before me. I did not dare use the expression that Wagner had painted ‘my hour’ musically”.6 His description of “[seeing] all my colours in my mind’s eye” and the notion of painting musically has led many scholars and historians to suggest that what he was actually experiencing was a sound-colour synesthetic response to the musical stimulus and that his work stems from his desire to use colours and shapes to paint how he saw various musical compositions. According to this myth, he was, essentially, trying to illustrate the colours of the music he heard so that he may share with the world how he experienced music. His efforts to do so have been lauded by historians of Abstract art and Abstract Expressionism who romanticise and repeat this narrative without regard to its undeniable falsification of why Kandinsky painted in the way that he did.
Occurring in approximately 2 to 4 per cent of the global population, synesthesia can be defined as a “condition in which stimulation in one sensory or cognitive stream involuntarily, or automatically, leads to associated internal or external (illusory or hallucinatory) experiences in a second unstimulated sensory or cognitive systema”.7 Simply put, a synesthetic brain binds one of the five senses with other, unrelated, sensory and/or cognitive colour experiences. This can manifest itself in many forms. It could be hearing specific sounds or music notes evokes the concurrent colour (e.g. hearing a car horn evokes the colour yellow and hearing a bird chirp evokes the colour purple), known as sound-colour synesthesia, or it could be that the input is seeing a number or letter which appears to the synesthetic viewer as a concurrent colour (e.g. the number 5 will appear to be the colour blue and the letter ‘p’ will appear to be the colour red), known as grapheme-color synesthesia, or the input could be specific tastes or flavors (e.g. something slaty evokes the colour green and raspberry flavoring evokes the colour orange), known as taste-colour synesthesia. Research shows that the synesthetic brain can also evoke colours for emotional stimuli such as fear, happiness or excitement. The exact cause of this phenomenon remains unknown and some argue that it is merely an individual sensation rather than a physical or structural difference in the brain. However, studies of grapheme-color synesthesia have shown that synesthetic brains are able to solve puzzles and equations significantly faster and more accurate than control groups and other studies have shown activity in areas of the brain unrelated to audio processing in response to subjects listening to sounds while blindfolded, suggesting their ability to correlate sounds with colours is irrespective of concurrent visual stimulus.8
Concerning the Spiritual in Art is often referenced to support claims of synesthesia, however, given that this was dedicated to explaining his fascination with colour in terms of his motivation to understand the “psychic effect” of looking at colour which, Kandinsky believed, produced a “corresponding spiritual vibration … which undoubtedly works upon the soul”, it is clear that his reference to music and sounds for their similar psychic effect on the viewer has been taken out of context. “With few exceptions”, he wrote, “music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist’s soul, in musical sound” and that “The various arts of today learn from each other and often resemble each other”.9 From this, we can understand that Kandinsky was not so much trying to find a visual representation for his own response to music as he was attempting to learn to go beyond the conventional external limits of art and express his “inner need”, that is, his inner self.10 After understanding how musicians had been so successful in using only sound, Kandinsky attempted to provide a framework for artists to omit recognisable forms or figures in favour of specific elemental combinations to express their own inner need. This can most strongly be evidenced in his development of a theoretical explanation for how colours generate unconscious feeling in the viewer. Kandinsky was a firm believer that an “artist must train not only his eye but also his soul”, and his theory, outlined in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, enabled artists to “test colours for themselves and not by external impressions”, essentially laying the groundwork for the importance of subjectivity and the individual artist at the very basis of twentieth century art in the West.11
The same year Kandinsky visited Wagner’s opera, 1896, he also visited an exhibition of French Impressionist works in Moscow where he saw a painting from Claude Monet’s Haystacks series and later recounted having had an emotional reaction to the images even before recognising what the objects were, realising it was not the haystacks themselves he felt so moved by, but, rather, the colours and nonrepresentational forms with which they were depicted.12 These two revelations were the final push he was hoping for to abandon his academic career at the University of Moscow and permanently move to Munich to become an artist.
In the final years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, Kandinsky grew increasingly determined to develop a universal language through which the emotional and spiritual factors of his art could be understood without having to undertake the exasperating task of explaining it. While he eventually detailed his new language model in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, his many artworks from this time show his experimentation and progressive abstraction. For example, the landscape paintings At Starnberg – Winter (1901-02) and Münich – The Isar (1901) are painted with loose, fast brushstrokes characteristic of the Impressionist style of Monet’s haystacks that first inspired his art, but, by 1910, Kandinsky’s abstracted forms had grown bolder as he developed his language of colour and allowed himself to be guided by his inner basis rather than tradition, as seen in Landscape with Factory Chimney (1910).
As outlined in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, there are two categories a painting can be placed in based on its overall form: the first of these, what Kandinsky names the “melodic”, has a simple composition and its structure has an obvious form with a simple inner value. The second composition is more complex, comprising various forms all of which are clearly subjected to a single, principle form. This is what he calls the “symphonic”. These two distinctions are not absolute and an artwork may reside somewhere in between, in which case, the melodic principle is dominant. Again referring to the similarities between the laws of his new abstract artform and those of music, Kandinsky notes that, in relation to the melodic composition, if the objective is removed and the basic form is revealed, then “one discovers primitive geometric forms or an arrangement of simple lines, which serve as common movement”, which may be repeated in various sections of the painting, much in the same way music compositions create a common movement by the repetition of arrangements throughout a melody.13
The symphonic construction itself can be further subcategorised into one of three sources of inspiration: The first is the result of a direct impression of the artist’s outward nature expressed in pure artistic form, which are to be known as “impressions”. The second are intuitive and spontaneous expressions or impressions of the artist’s inner nature, called “improvisations”. The third and final symphonic subcategory, known as “compositions”, wherein “Reason, consciousness, purpose, and adequate law play an overwhelming part”, should not be misunderstood as the artist being guided by mere calculations of objective factors, as, Kandinsky stresses, feeling is the decisive factor in its construction.14 Regardless of the melodic or symphonic composition, an artist can signal the emotional meaning of an artwork through the use of specific colours and forms.
Beginning with lightness or darkness, warmth or coolness, an artist constructs a “spiritual journey” through colour, moving across the horizontal plane from beginning (lightness) to end (darkness), represented by white and black respectively. The itinerary of this journey and its destination is controlled by combining the two primary colours, blue (representing coolness and concentric movement) and yellow (representing warmth and excentric movement) which creates green (representing stagnation and logic), or by movement in the third primary colour, red, across the horizontal plane towards the coolness and concentric withdrawal of blue or along the vertical plane towards the warmth and excentric projection of yellow. This movement of red will inevitably result in one of two possibilities: along the horizontal plane in retreat from the viewer’s inner self and thus extinguishing for the artist the possibility of an extrinsic tangibility by way of landing in violet and resulting in an image withdrawn from humanity and into the spiritual, or along the vertical plane towards the viewer’s inner self, and landing in orange resulting in an image of the artist’s individual, physical reality successfully projected out to the viewer.15 Traversing between these two spiritual and physical endpoints is transfiguration. In this sense, Kandinsky is instructing artists to “train” their senses by undertaking this journey to express their inner need, and, by doing so in a manner unlike anything seen in traditional representational art, they will resist pressures of preconceived notions of art and beauty.16
Combining and mixing colours will, of course, result in variations to their meaning, although it is here that yellow makes itself distinct from the other two primary colours. Yellow is singular in that, for Kandinsky, it can never have profound meaning as its only possible combinations are with white, which will result in increasingly excentric movement as the shade becomes lighter before silencing completely into white; with orange which will result in ever lighter shades of both; or with blue or black, both of which results in shades of green and its associated stagnation. All horizontal movement of the extrinsic values, therefore, ceases with green, making green the most restful, passive colour. The cloistered locale of yellow is paralleled in human nature with madness, “not with melancholy or hypochondriacal mania”, Kandinsky states, “but rather with violent raving lunacy”.17 Profound meaning can, however, be found in blue with its inner appeal growing stronger as its shade and concentric movement deepen. An addition of white results in an increasingly lighter shade of blue, but, unlike yellow, its coolness can never entirely be erased; combination with red, as discussed, results in the spiritual depths of violet and purple; or with black which results in deeper shades of blue before being absorbed completely into black, where it thus meets the silence of death.
Red is a particularly interesting colour for study, and one that Kandinsky indulges in extensively, as, when taken by itself, red is material and much like yellow it has little deep appeal but, unlike yellow, still glows from within itself. Only when moved and combined with something nobler does red gain a deep appeal. However, deepening red by an admixture of black is dangerous, as black reduces its inner glow, but, unlike the inner glow of blue, which is quickly extinguished, it can never be entirely obliterated as a trace of its material nature will always remain in the form of deep crimson, maroon and, eventually, in brown.18
In the late 1920s, as painting had been “freed from practical meaning and liberated from the necessity of responding to the many purposes it had earlier been forced to serve” and the resulting Abstract art began to gain ground, Kandinsky saw this as an opportunity to place himself at the apex of movement’s pyramid and attempted to detach his work from Spiritualism he had previously aligned with by reframing it as the new artistic language of Abstraction. In 1926, Kandinsky published Point and Line to Plane wherein he declared that the new art, having gained freedom from its earlier regulations, “has attained a level which imperiously demands that an exact scientific examination be made about the pictorial means and purposes of painting”, and the artist set about providing this scientific examination, as, “Without such an investigation”, he prophesied, “further advance is impossible – either for the artist or the general public”.19 While Concerning the Spiritual in Art explores the “psychic effect” of colour, whereby “colour awakens a corresponding physical sensation, which undoubtedly works upon the soul”, Point and Line to Plane employs a much more scientific approach to its explanation of the specific meanings of lines and the forms they create, essentially outlining the grammatical structure of the new language and how it can be used to further infuse an image with emotion.20
In Kandinsky’s updated philosophy, all forms originate from a single point of contact between the tool and the basic plane, point zero, which is the proto-element of painting and has a concentric tension.21 While the point must have certain characteristics that separate it from its surroundings, it can grow to cover the entire basic plane and its boundaries are therefore determined with consideration to the size of the point in relation to the size of the plane, and the size of the point relative to that of other forms on the same plane. In Point and Line to Plane, Kandinsky again references music but, instead of specific sounds correlating to specific colours, he outlines that each element has an unspecific sound within itself. The simplest and briefest form is that which lies centrally on a square plane and produces the double sound of the form and plane which, with the sound of the plane being too slight to be noticeable, is reduced to a single sound. The collision between the proto-element and the basic plane thus results in the prototype of pictorial expression.22
When the point is acted upon and moved by an external force, the track created can be identified as a line. With the point’s concentric tension destroyed by the force, Kandinsky defines the line as the antithesis to the pictorial proto-element and thus designates it a secondary element. The formation of this line can be due to the application of one force that, when originating from outside the point, pushes it in any direction and the force, by virtue of being a single action, ceases after its initial thrust with the line remaining unchanged or stopped, extending into infinity. This single force creates one of three lines: the horizontal, which is the simplest form of the straight line and corresponds to the line or plane upon which a human being imagines themselves standing or moving. “Coldness” and “flatness” characterise the horizontal line and it “represents the potential for endless cold movement”. The vertical line, in which the coldness and flatness of the horizontal is supplanted by warmth and height, “represents the potential for endless warm movement”.
Both horizontal and vertical lines are known as being at “rest” and, given that they cannot be replicated when in a central position, they are solitary and develop strong sounds which can never be completely quietened but can be amplified by joining or overlapping, resulting in, for example, a cross or square, which amplifies their respective sounds. They therefore “represent the proto-sound of straight lines” and, in turn, the “prototype of linear composition”. The third line, the diagonal, diverges from the horizontal or vertical at a single, continuous angle and encompasses all lines that are not perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical, representing the “union of coldness and warmth” and the “potentiality for endless cold-warm movement”.23 Furthermore, when a point moves and becomes a diagonal line, it then comes to represent levels of harmony with a diagonal line beginning on the right side of the plane and travelling towards the left being “harmonious”, and a diagonal line travelling in the opposite direction being “disharmonious”.24 There exists, too, diagonal-like lines, that Kandinsky calls Free Straight lines, which, unlike diagonal lines, can never attain a balance between coldness and warmth and therefore can lie upon and share a common centre with a given plane, known as centric lines, or without a common centre, known as acentric.25
Alternatively, a line formation can be due to the application of several forces that can either be the single but repeated actions of two forces with alternating collision points, forming an angular line, such as a zig-zag, or a simultaneous action by multiple forces with multiple collision points, which forms a curved line. When formed by multiple forces, either alternate or simultaneous, Kandinsky states that the line is “hotter” than when formed by a single force. The continuation of forces will result in either a single line extending into infinity or the line eventually returning to its point of origin, thus creating a form which is a new plane located on top of the basic plane (that being the canvas). The three primary, or basic, forms are those of the triangle, produced by three collisions, the square, produced by four collisions, and the circle, produced by two continuing simultaneous forces. Whereas there are limited possibilities and simple classifications for all straight lines, the differences between curved or non-straight lines depend entirely upon the size of the angles created by the trusts – the three typical angles a line can create are acute at 45°, right at 90° or obtuse at 135°. The remainder will always be atypical acute or obtuse angles and Kandinsky defines these as a Free Angular Line.26
In addition to characterising each element with temperatures, Kandinsky, famously, relates them to sounds. In the same way that a musician using specific notes, chords and harmonies can convey a narrative to the audience, Kandinsky states that, in art, “Colour is the keyboard, they eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings” and that the artist “is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul”.27 Undertaking the impossible task of describing colour using only words, Kandinsky relates them to orchestra instruments: yellow “sounds like a shrill horn, blown constantly louder, or a high pitched flourish of trumpets”; “a light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a cello; a still darker a thunderous double bass; and the darkest blue of all – an organ”; green is “the placid, middle notes of a violin”; violet is “an English horn, or the deep notes of wood instruments”; red is the “sound of trumpets, strong, harsh, and ringing”, although, a light red “sounds like a trumpet accompanied by the tuba, a persistent imposing, strong tone”, vermilion “rings like a great trumpet, or thunders like a drum”, and the closer red moves toward yellow, the more it sounds like “a medium-sized church bell reminding one of a strong alto voice or the singing of alto violins”; once red has become orange, it is that of “an old violin”.28 It is for this descriptive phrasing that sound-colour synesthesia speculation took hold. Although, the decision to relate colours to music makes sense for Kandinsky who believed that, like colour, “musical sound acts directly on the soul and finds an echo there”, and that, like art, “music is innate in man”.29 But he didn’t stop with colours – in Point and Line to Plane, he explains the rules of his new language of Abstract art, translating the elements into musical compositions and vice versa.
Using Beethoven’s 5th Symphony as an example, Kandinsky shows that points can also be translated into music, especially by percussion instruments and the piano, which enables the creation of painted compositions through combinations of the sequence of tonal points.30 When a point lies on any given plane, it produces the double sound of the point-plane, which becomes audible only once the point is moved from the center of the plane, and, as the point grows to cover more of the plane’s surface, it becomes clearer and louder, eventually overcoming the sound of the plane and so takes on the character of a single sound. Lines, too, have corresponding sounds, with its width corresponding to the pitch produced: “a very fine line represents the sound produced by the violin, flute, piccolo”, whereas a thicker line “represents the tone of the viola, clarinet”, and as the line becomes thicker, the tone becomes deeper, eventually “culminating in the broadest line representing the deepest tones produced by the bass-viol or the tuba”.31
Each line on the plane produces a single sound which can be increased, decreased or combined with others to form a multitude of sounds, for example, the prototype of linear composition can be created by combining three horizontal and three vertical lines to create a square divided into four equal parts. Separately, the four sounds of the square plane and the two sounds of the horizontal and vertical line elements produce a total of six sounds, although when the horizontal and vertical lines are laid over top of the square plane, the plane’s sound is doubled to 12.32
In order to further clarify his new language, Kandinsky also relates colours to specific feelings and experiences, such as yellow and red, both of which “arouses the feeling of strength, energy, ambition, determination, joy, triumph”; dark blue, “develops an element of repose” and when it sinks into black, “it echoes a grief that is hardly human”; black itself is “a nothingness after sunset, black sounds like an eternal silence, without future or hope”; orange is “like a human being, aware of his own power and emanating happiness and health”.33 Nevertheless, the inclusion of these characteristics has not led to allegations of Kandinsky having had emotion-colour synesthesia and conveying how he experienced different emotions through his art.
Ultimately, it cannot be known whether Kandinsky had any form of synesthesia or not, although the fact that he never claimed to have synesthetic responses to any external stimulus, despite his knowledge of the condition, which he wrote about in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, strongly suggests that he did not. This is further evidenced by his fascination with music since learning to play the piano and cello from the age of five, but never had he documented experiencing the notes he played or heard as through seeing them in colour prior to the performance of Wagner’s opera when he was thirty years old. In fact, as he recalled in Reminiscences, it wasn't until he was a student at Moscow University that he began to refer to his art with musical terminology, stating he sought to “capture on the canvas a ‘color chorus’ (As I called it) which, bursting out of nature, forced itself into my very soul”.34
“A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end”, Kandinsky states. “He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art”.35 His reason for choosing music as a reference point can, therefore, be understood by his belief that music is the artform which had, until that point in time, most successfully expressed the artist’s inner basis and because music is inherently abstract – it conveys a narrative without any recognisable forms or figures and maintains the ability to profoundly affect the audience without requiring prior knowledge of the narrative. Kandinsky wanted his paintings to be an expression of his inner basis without having to undertake the tiresome task of explaining it, and so attempted to learn from music by applying a musical construction to painting.
The myth that Kandinsky was attempting to convey how he saw the world has led to historians claiming he had synesthesia using selected parts of Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Point and Line to Plane as evidence, but the entirety of these texts show that he was actually attempting to provide a scientific explanation for Abstract art, as he himself stated. In doing so, Kandinsky was able to profess himself the pioneer of Abstract art and put himself at the top of the pyramid.
1. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T.H Sadler, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 1977).
2. Julia Voss, Hilma af Klint: A Biography, trans. Anne Posten (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2022).
3. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
4. Voss, Hilma af Klint.
5. Ferdinand Avenarius, “Der Kunstwart: Rundschau über alle Gebiete des Schönen” in Monatshefte für Kunst, Literatur und Leben 21, no. 4 (August 1908):185-193, doi.org/10.11588/diglit.7707-0230
Voss, Hilma af Klint.
6. Wassily Kandinsky, “Reminiscences (1913)” in Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Essays, ed. Robert L. Herbert, (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964), 19-44, originally published in Wassily Kandinsky, Kandinsky 1901-1913 (Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm, 1913).
7. Berit Brogaard, “Color Synesthesia”, in Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology, ed., Ronnier Luo, (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8_112-7
8. Brogaard, “Color Synesthesia”.
9. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
10. Ibid. 26.
11. Ibid. 46-47.
12. Kandinsky, “Reminiscences (1913)”.
13. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
14. Ibid. 57.
15. Ibid. 36-38.
16. Ibid. 46-47.
17. Ibid. 38.
18. Ibid. 40.
19. Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, eds., Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay, trans., Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, (Dessau: Bauhaus Publications, 1926; New York: Dover Publications, 1947).
20. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
21. Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane.
22. Ibid. 36.
23. Ibid. 55-67
24. Ibid. 126-31.
25. Ibid. 61.
26. Ibid. 66-73.
27. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
28. Ibid. 63-71
29. Ibid. 44.
30. Ibid. 43-45.
31. Ibid. 98.
32. Ibid. 66.
33. Ibid. 64-69.
34. Kandinsky, “Reminiscences (1913)”.
35. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
Image credits:
Figure 1: Wassily Kandinsky, Yellow Red Blue (1925). Oil on canvas, 128 x 201.5 cm. Musée National d'Art Moderne, France.
Figure 2: Wassily Kandinsky, Composition IV (1911). Oil on canvas, 159.5 x 250.5 cm. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany.
Figure 3: Wassily Kandinsky, Composition V (1911). Oil on canvas, 190 x 275 cm. Private collection.
Figure 4: Katharine Schäffner, Passion (Leidenschaft) (1906) (Published in Der Kunstwart, in 1908). Charcoal on paper, 27.6 x 21.3 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York, U.S.A.
Figure 5: Wassily Kandinsky, At Starnberg – Winter (1901-02). Oil on canvas, 23.8 cm x 32.3 cm. Städtische Gallery, Germany.
Figure 6: Wassily Kandinsky, Munich – The Isar (1901). Oil on canvas, 32.5 cm x 23.6 cm. Städtische Gallery, Germany.
Figure 7: Wassily Kandinsky, Landscape With Factory Chimney (1910). Oil on canvas, 66.2 x 82 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, U.S.A.
Figure 8: Wassily Kandinsky, Impression III (Concert) (1911). Oil on canvas, 77.5 x 100 cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Germany.
Figure 9: Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation, Dreamy (1913). Oil on canvas, 130.7 x 130.7 cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Germany.
Figure 10: Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII (1913). Oil on canvas, 200.6 x 302.2 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Russia.
Figure 11: Diagram of Kandinsky's primary colours showing possible combinations and the life cycle between birth and death. Image provided by the author.
Figure 12: Diagram of Kandinsky's movements of red. Image provided by the author.
Figure 13: Diagram of Kandinsky's eccentric and concentric movements of red. Image provided by the author.
Figure 14: Wassily Kandinsky, Diagram of the primary contrasting lines formed by multiple collision points. Image via Point and Line to Plane, 80.
Figure 15: Wassily Kandinsky, Translation of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, first movement into points. Image via Point and Line to Plane, 43.
Figure 16: Wassily Kandinsky, Translation of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, second movement into points. Image via Point and Line to Plane, 45.
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