Rarely has a painter maintained such a profound connection with music as Wassily Kandinsky. More than a source of inspiration, it constituted for him a true model of thought and the driving force behind his transition to abstraction. 

It is this intimate relationship between sounds, forms and colours that the exhibition "Kandinsky – The Music of Colours", presented by the Musée de la musique – Philharmonie de Paris jointly with the Centre Pompidou, proposes to explore through nearly 200 works and objects from the artist's studio.

Born in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky grew up in an environment steeped in Russian folklore, diverse landscapes, and a rich musical culture. Raised in a cultured family, he played the cello and harmonium from a young age and developed a passion for the great musical figures of his time. Long destined for a legal career, he experienced a profound aesthetic revelation in 1896 during a performance of Lohengrin Wagner's experience was a formative one that led him to abandon law and become a painter. 

He then chose to study painting in Munich, where he arrived in 1896. There, he developed a style characterized by intense colors and an expressive touch, influenced by Post-Impressionism. His early works, still figurative, drew on Russian folk imagery and reflected a particular attention to the rhythms and vibrations of the visible world. From this period onward, he championed spontaneity and freedom as the founding principles of his art.  

While continuing to paint, he traveled throughout Europe and North Africa, spent a year in Paris, and then returned to Germany in 1908, settling in Murnau. It was then that his artistic career truly began: his painting broke free from the amateur mold to assert itself with a new ambition and maturity. While his preferred themes—landscapes and popular culture—remained the same, he treated them in an increasingly abstract manner. Gradually, Kandinsky moved away from simply imitating nature to explore a freer pictorial language, guided by emotion and inner perception. 

His foundational text The spiritual in art, Published in 1911, it sets forth his theoretical vision of art, which he considers an expression of inner life. Kandinsky distinguishes the three genres explored in his pictorial creation: "impressions," inspired by the external world; "improvisations"; and "compositions," stemming from inner and spiritual impulses, with the compositions being more elaborate from a formal point of view. This progression accompanies his shift toward an increasingly radical abstraction, where forms and colors become the visual equivalent of sounds. 

In 1912, he published the almanac with Franz Marc Der blaue reiter ("The Blue Rider"), a major work bringing together works and writings of various artists, which lays the theoretical foundations of abstraction, art no longer seeking to reproduce visible reality, but to illustrate mental questions.

From then on, Kandinsky abandoned all explicit figurative references. He now sought to transcribe the vibrations of the soul through abstract forms and "sonorous" colors. Music then acted as an ideal model: an art abstract by nature, freed from the representation of reality. The works of composers such as Alexander Scriabin, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Thomas von Hartmann shaped his listening horizons and directly nourished his visual language.

The exhibition highlights this passion through an imaginary cabinet dedicated to Kandinsky's love of music, revealing scores, musical books and brochures, records, and photographs of his musical friendships. These objects testify to the importance of listening in his creative process, particularly in his work on the "sonority" of colors and his visual studies inspired by music. Symphony No. 5 of Beethoven. 

Appointed professor at the Bauhaus in 1922, Kandinsky continued his exploration of the synthesis of the arts and abstraction. There, he taught a holistic conception of creation, in which painting, music, theater, and dance interacted. The exhibition revisits his stage experiments, his poems exploring the "pure sound" of words, and his synesthetic performances, notably the staging of Paintings at an exhibition by Mussorgsky in 1928.

"Kandinsky – The Music of Colors" offers a fresh perspective on one of the pioneers of abstraction. The exhibition reveals a complete artist—painter, theorist, teacher, and music lover—for whom music was much more than an inspiration: an essential key to thinking about and experiencing art.

“Kandinsky – The Music of Colors”
City of Music – Philharmonie de Paris
221, avenue Jean-Jaurès, Paris 19^e 

philharmoniedeparis.fr