Kandinsky, Drawing and Music
Six things you might not know about the role music played in Wassily Kandinsky’s art
Untitled (1916) by Wassily KandinskyCourtauld
1. Kandinsky could hear colour
He associated each note of the scale with a specific colour. This phenomenon of one sense triggering another is known as synaesthesia.
2. A musical performance inspired him to change careers
At a performance of Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, Russia in 1896, Kandinsky ‘saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.’ He soon abandoned his law career to study painting.
3. Arnold Schoenberg’s music guided him toward abstraction
The Viennese modernist composer abandoned tonal and harmonic conventions in his compositions. This inspired Kandinsky to abandon representing recognisable objects in favour of line, colour and texture.
4. Kandinsky gave his paintings and drawings musical titles
Many of his works are called ‘Improvisations’ and ‘Compositions’.
5. Music inspired Kandinsky’s work in black and white, too
The play of lines in Untitled (1916) mimics the rhythms and the intertwining of melody and harmony in a piece of music.
An early experiment in abstraction, this drawing is small in scale but feels complete, as if Kandinsky has created a fully realised cosmic world.
6. Kandinsky often imitated printed music in his drawings
The parallel lines resemble the lines of a stave (the five parallel lines representing the musical pitches) and the short, dashed brushstrokes look like notes...
...But instead of running straight across the sheet, they bend and whirl. Could Kandinsky have been imitating the way playing music sets the written notes free from the page?
Driven by synaesthesia, Kandinsky liberated the line from reality, allowing it to dance like a musical note. This drawing is an example of abstraction: a cosmic world where you can see the sound and hear the colour.
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