In 1896, Wassily Kandinsky30, attended a performance of the opera Lohengrin of Richard Wagner in it Bolshoi Theater of Moscow.
“I saw in my mind all my colors; they appeared before my mind. Wild, almost crazy lines appeared before me,” said the artist when remembering that first encounter with the romantic opera of Wagner. “It became clear to me that painting could develop the same powers as music.” That same year, he moved from Russia to Munich to study painting.
The transformative encounter of Kandinsky with Lohengrin is examined in the inaugural gallery of Kandinsky. The music of colorsexhibition on display until February 1, 2026 at the Paris Philharmonic Music Museumin front of the Grand Palais. Approximately three quarters of the almost 200 works and objects come from the Pompidou Center in Pariswhich houses one of the largest collections of Kandinsky and co-organizes the exhibition.
The glass and metal building of the Pompidou It is being renovated, with completion scheduled for 2030. The music of colors It is one of the exhibitions and events in which the Pompidou participate during this period.
It is also the latest installment in the exhibition series of the Music Museum dedicated to visual artists such as Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
“I think that the experience of Music Museum lies in his ability to reflect on the links between music and Fine Arts; “It is not just a matter of biography or sensory parallels,” he said. Marie-Pauline Martindirector of the museum, who organized the exhibition together with Angela Lampecurator of modern art at Pompidou.
“We try not to repeat the same recipe in each project,” Martin added, explaining that research is always his starting point to create an “audiovisual identity that fits the theme.” An essential resource for The music of colors was Kandinsky’s archive at the Pompidou, donated by the artist’s second wife, Nina, which includes 95 shellac records owned by the couple.
Martin admitted that setting up the exhibition about Kandinsky required a much more intellectual, sensitive and ethereal approach than the exhibition of Basquiatwhich immersed visitors in the often abrasive sound world of downtown New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s. In collaboration with the pianist Mikhail Rudymusic advisor for The music of colorsMartin and Lampe created a soundtrack with important music for Kandinskyquotes from the artist and an original sound design. Visitors wear geolocated headphones that automatically change tracks—for example, from the prelude to Lohengrin to a traditional Russian Orthodox chant—as they walk through room after room.
Twelve thematic sections reveal the extent to which music influenced the theory and practice of Kandinsky throughout his entire career. Many emerged before the First World War, when he was part of the Blue Rider circle of artists (The Blue Reiter), based in Munich, and in the interwar period, when he taught classes at the Bauhausan influential German art school. Both his increasingly bold chromatic experiments on canvas and his graphic attempts to represent musical scores demonstrate that his thinking on the relationship between sound and image could be spiritual or analytical.
Few of the works on display illustrate specific pieces of music. One of them is Impression III (Concert) (1911), on loan from Lenbachhaus museum of Munich. Kandinsky He painted it as a synesthetic response to a concert by Arnold Schoenberg which he attended in Munich. The discovery of Schoenberg’s atonal compositions provided a generative aesthetic impact, comparable to his earlier Wagnerian epiphany. That night, the program included the influential String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10 (1907-1908) by Schoenberg, whose first movement resonates for museum visitors as they approach the painting: a riot of color formally arranged according to musical principles such as variations in rhythm and pitch.
“The particular destinies, the autonomous paths, the very life of the individual voices in his compositions are precisely what I have been looking for in the pictorial form,” he wrote. Kandinsky to Schoenberg after that concert.
They both became friends. In an essay for Blue Rider Almanac (1912), also present in the exhibition, Schoenberg considered Kandinsky among the few artists who “paint pictures in which the external object is barely more than a stimulus to improvise in color and form.”
Twenty discs from the archive Kandinsky exhibited testify to an eclectic musical taste: works by Bach, Stravinskythe Three Cent Opera of Kurt Weil, Kol Nidrei and dance music from the 1920s. Also exhibited is a partial reconstruction of the staging of Pictures from an exhibition of Modest Mussorgsky in Dessau (1928), the only occasion in which Kandinsky directed and designed a musical production.
Kandinsky used to choose musical titles—such as “Improvisation,” “Fuga,” and “Song”—but reserved the name Composition for ten of his most ambitious canvases. lampe He stressed that it was revealing that this was the name reserved for his most important works.
The music of colors concludes with the last three of these pieces: Composition 8 (1923), from New York Guggenheim; Composition 9 (1936), from Pompidou; and Composition 10 (1939), provided by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen from Dusseldorf.
lampe stated that this final group seeks to highlight how music provided Kandinsky the conceptual basis to take his work beyond figuration. “That was his intellectual model: music as abstract art par excellence”, he concluded.
Source: The New York Times
(Photos: Musée de la musique-Philharmonie de Paris)
