Wassily Kandinsky | A Curated Gallery for Reading & Relaxation

Is it possible to hear color? At thirty, Wassily Kandinsky was a legal scholar in Moscow with a professorship already on offer. Then he watched a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin and something happened that he never fully explained: violins arrived to him as violet, cellos as deep red, the music moving across his vision as color. He turned the professorship down, moved to Munich, and started painting. He described the turning point differently years later. Returning to his studio one evening, he found a canvas propped on its side, unrecognizable in the fading light, and it was, he wrote, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Only when he lit a lamp did he realize it was his own painting, turned sideways. If a picture could be beautiful with no subject at all, he reasoned, subject was never the point. In Munich in 1911 he and Franz Marc founded Der Blaue Reiter, named for a color they both loved and a horse neither of them could quite explain. That same year Kandinsky published a small book arguing that painting could work like music, color and form carrying feeling directly, with no object required to carry it for them. It became one of the founding texts of abstract art. The war sent him back to Russia as an enemy alien. The revolution that followed gave him institutions to help build, then grew suspicious of exactly the art those institutions were built for. He left in 1921, taught color theory at the Bauhaus for a decade, and in 1933 watched the Nazis close the school and later hang his paintings in an exhibition built to humiliate them. He was sixty-seven. He moved to Paris and kept painting until 1944, the forms softer now, still built on the same conviction, that a shape and a color could mean something on their own terms, needing nothing else to stand for. Each painting is shown for around three minutes in high resolution with slow, almost imperceptible movement. Use it as a backdrop for reading, studying, working, or slow mornings. THE EXHIBITION 0:00 Welcome 0:20 Chapter I · Munich & The Blue Rider 0:28 The Blue Rider (1903) 3:26 Blue Mountain (1908–1909) 6:23 Murnau, The Garden II (1910) 9:21 Improvisation 19 (1911) 12:18 Composition IV (1911) 15:17 Chapter II · The Threshold of Abstraction 15:26 Composition V (1911) 18:23 Improvisation 28 (second version) (1912) 21:21 Black Lines (1913) 24:18 Composition VI (1913) 27:16 Composition VII (1913) 30:15 Chapter III · Russia, Bauhaus & The Geometric Turn 30:23 Moscow I (Red Square) (1916) 33:21 In Grey (1919) 36:18 On White II (1923) 39:16 Composition VIII (1923) 42:13 Yellow-Red-Blue (1925) 45:11 Several Circles (1926) 48:10 Chapter IV · Paris, The Final Decade 48:18 Composition IX (1936) 51:16 Composition X (1939) 54:13 Sky Blue (1940) 57:11 Reciprocal Accord (1942) ABOUT THIS SERIES Beautiful Intellectualism explores art, culture, books, history and the pursuit of knowledge as a form of beauty. New curated galleries are published regularly. Subscribe to visit the next room. #kandinsky #abstractart #artgallery #relaxation #studywithme