Wassily Kandinsky

Imagine walking into a room and seeing a painting hanging upside down. You look at it for a while, then you realize that you painted it yourself. That’s what happened to Wassily Kandinsky, and for him, it was a revelation: the subject no longer mattered; it was color, form, and vibration that spoke directly to the soul. For decades, we believed that art had to represent something, that it had to soothe the eye with landscapes, faces, or stories. But Kandinsky turned everything on its head: art does not imitate reality; it reinvents it. True painting does not describe; it makes emotions we didn’t even know we had resonate. Born in Moscow to a family of tea merchants, the son of Lidia Ticheeva and Vassily Silvestrovich, with a great-grandmother who was a princess, Kandinsky was destined for a comfortable life. After graduating in law, at the age of thirty, he left everything behind and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He was not accepted right away, so he cut his teeth on his own, traveling and observing. In 1889, he took part in an ethnographic expedition to northern Russia: he entered churches filled with color and felt as if he were “inside a painting.” He said, “As I entered, I felt as if I were moving within a painting.” This instant love affair with color would never leave him. Once, standing in front of a Monet painting – a simple haystack – he wrote: “I couldn't make out what it was. It was painful; I thought a painter shouldn't paint indistinctly. Yet that painting had made an impression on me and remained etched in my memory.” During those years, he met Gabriele Münter, first as a student and later as a life and travel partner. Together, they traveled across Europe, founded groups of rebellious artists, and provided refuge for fellow artists during the Nazi regime. Münter would also be the person who, during a creative block, encouraged him to overcome his block on Composition VI simply by repeating the word “flood” aloud, like a mantra. Kandinsky did not only paint pictures; he also wrote books that changed the history of art. In “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” he argues that every painter should paint out of an inner necessity, not to please others. For him, the artist is a prophet who lives at the top of a pyramid, sees the future, and shows it to others. His painting falls into three categories: impressions (inspired by reality), improvisations (spontaneous emotions), and compositions (large works created methodically). However, as time goes on, his canvases increasingly become abstract worlds, swirls of colors and shapes that do not represent anything recognizable but resonate with something inside the viewer. Kandinsky listened to Wagner, read Madame Blavatsky, and became fascinated by Theosophy and the idea that everything in the universe is made up of vibrations, sounds, and colors that resonate with one another. He even went so far as to believe that yellow was “the C note of a trumpet” and that black was “the closure, the end of things.” Some art historians say that his true turning point toward abstraction came when he discovered that his painting, viewed upside down, still made sense: the subject might disappear, but the power remained. In 1911, along with artists such as Franz Marc and August Macke, he founded the Der Blaue Reiter group. They organized exhibitions and wrote an almanac that became the bible of the new art. But then came war, the Russian Revolution, and disillusionment: his spiritual vision did not align with the new Soviet orthodoxy. He returned to Germany and taught at the Bauhaus, where he authored his second theoretical book, “Point and Line to Plane,” exploring how geometric shapes influence the psyche. When the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis, he took refuge in Paris, where he spent his final years painting in a small room. During this period, his paintings became even more mysterious: biomorphisms, Slavic colors, and sand mixed into the paint. Some of his most famous canvases were destroyed in bombings or confiscated by the Nazis as “degenerate art.” Others ended up in museums, and some were returned to their robbed heirs after lengthy legal battles. In 2012, a study for “Improvisation 8” was auctioned for $23 million. But Kandinsky’s true legacy is not auction records; it is his ideas: that art is not meant to represent the world, but to enable us to experience the world through new eyes. What no one expects is that Kandinsky saw the painter as a musician: “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings.” The artist is the hand that makes those strings vibrate in the soul of the viewer. Today, we think of abstract art as difficult, distant. Kandinsky wanted the opposite: pure emotion, accessible to anyone willing to listen. If art seems dry or incomprehensible to you, perhaps it is simply your mind seeking a subject where, instead, there are emotions to be felt. Here’s the bottom line: painting doesn’t imitate reality; it resonates in the soul like music that needs no words. If this idea has stirred something inside you, on Lara Notes you can press I'm In – it's not a heart; it's your way of saying that, from today, this perspective belongs to you. And if you end up telling someone that Kandinsky invented abstraction by looking at his painting upside down, on Lara Notes you can mark the conversation with Shared Offline: that way, whoever was with you will know that that moment mattered. All of this comes from Wikipedia and has saved you at least 45 minutes of reading.