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MEET WASSILY KANDINSKY, THE ARTIST THAT PAINTED MUSIC

Published: 2025-11-02 19:55:26 Last Updated: 2025-11-03 16:07:51

Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian painter and art theorist, was a pioneer of abstract modern art. He investigated abstract forms and colour as a means of evoking spirituality and human feeling since he felt that "things destroyed pictures." He developed his own visual language that depicted human experience and went beyond the material world.
Kandinsky thought his paintings could convey specific sounds and considered music to be the most sublime kind of abstract art. "The key is colour." The hammer is the eye. He was cited as saying, "The piano with its countless chords is the soul." "The artist is the hand that instinctively causes the soul to vibrate by touching this or that key."
Discover six well-known Kandinsky paintings that exemplify the artist's creative genius by reading on.

This early piece of art marks a significant turning point in Kandinsky's evolving style, in contrast to the abstracted compositions for which he became well-known. Kandinsky used brief, vibrant brushstrokes to paint the sun-dappled countryside in one of his final works using this Impressionist style. The first of many riders in Kandinsky's paintings was the figure mounted on a horse. Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a four-year creative trend in Germany, was even influenced by it.

The painters of the Blue Rider group, which included August Macke, Franz Marc, and Wassily Kandinsky, all had a goal to use their work to convey spirituality. They had the following beliefs: that music and visual art are related; that colour has symbolic meanings; and that painting should be done impulsively and intuitively.

A semi-abstract depiction of Cossacks in Moscow during the revolutionary years of 1905–06 can be seen in Composition IV. Kandinsky's oil on canvas painting, which is one of ten in the collection, shows a conflict that ends in harmony. Kandinsky depicted a castle on a blue mountaintop, boats, and several Cossacks brandishing lances amid the vivid expanses of colour and strong black lines. Harmony and the conclusion of the conflict are symbolised by the flowing, reclining figures to the composition's right. In Kandinsky's subsequent works, these symbols and figures were reused and further abstracted.

Composition VII was written by Kandinsky in 1913 while he was residing in Munich, Germany. Although it can seem like a disorganised mess of symbols and forms, it was actually planned out months in advance. Kandinsky used watercolours and oil paints to make more than thirty sketches before settling on the composition.

Kandinsky referred to his paintings as "improvisations" and "compositions" because he thought they could conjure the sound of music. Composition VII was sometimes referred to as "operatic" due to its whirling whirlpool of colour and symbolism. Kandinsky kept several symbolic allusions in this picture, such as glyphs of boats with oars, mountains, and figures, while remaining committed to the topic of conflict and atonement.

The geometric arrangement of Composition VIII, which Kandinsky painted while he was a teacher at the Bauhaus, reflects the school's aesthetic philosophy and the artist's fascination with constructivism and suprematism. Kandinsky's belief that shape and color alone could convey emotion and sound is reflected in his use of circles, grids, semicircles, triangles, and other mathematical shapes.

Two of the six solar eclipses that took place between 1921 and 1923 took place in the year when Kandinsky composed Composition VIII. The painting's multicolored circles might have been inspired by these incidents. Kandinsky claimed that orange represented the alto range and black represented silence. Around the blue and red circles, yellow creates a halo, signifying sound bursts like booming trumpets and fanfares.

Throughout his work, Kandinsky broke the circle numerous times. The shape "is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions," he asserted. In a single form and in balance, it blends the eccentric and the concentric. "It most obviously points to the fourth dimension of the three primary forms," he adds.

Kandinsky only used one form in Several Circles, and that was the circle. He was able to concentrate on colour, scale, and composition as a result. The circles appear to move around the canvas and interact with one another, varying in size and colour. Where they meet, some even overlap and change colour. The idea that colours could have various spiritual meanings was supported by Kandinsky. The colours in this artwork encourage emotional balance, and the rounded shapes' dynamic movement suggests life itself, from water droplets on a leaf to stars in the universe.

This piece, which is the final in his Compositions series, represents the apex of Kandinsky's investigation into nonrepresentational form as a means of expression. The colours convey the inner feelings Kandinsky felt close to the end of his life, while the organic shapes were inspired by the biomorphic creatures of Surrealism.

The background's blackness makes the colored portions stand out while symbolising the universe and the end of existence. The circle of life and the emotional highs and lows that everyone goes through are shown in the picture.

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