You Can Listen to Kandinsky’s Vibrant Paintings at This New Exhibition in Paris
Through artworks and audio recordings, “Kandinsky: The Music of Colors” explores how music influenced the Russian artist’s abstract compositions
:focal(600x348:601x349)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/75/7b/757babc1-6624-414d-8400-e0b78a72b45c/vassily_kandinsky_1936_-_composition_ix.jpg)
Wassily Kandinsky considered his most important paintings to be the ten colorful, complex canvases in his Compositions series, which he completed in 1939. That he named this important series after a word typically associated with music is telling, Angela Lampe, a modern art curator at the Pompidou Center in Paris, tells the New York Times’ A.J. Goldmann.
The longstanding relationship between music and Kandinsky’s canvases is the subject of “Kandinsky: The Music of Colors,” an exhibition presented at the Philharmonie de Paris’ Musée de la Musique in collaboration with the Pompidou. Featuring nearly 200 works by the Russian pioneer of abstract art, as well as musical objects from his studio, “The Music of Colors” paints a vivid picture of the impact music had on Kandinsky’s work.
“For Kandinsky, music was a way to understand abstract art. It encouraged him to go beyond figurative art,” Lampe tells the Financial Times’ Nadia Beard. “Music was a model for art and an analogy.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/88/ee/88ee356e-6a7b-4da8-8c1b-dc838d136112/vassily_kandinsky_1939_-_composition_10.jpg)
Born in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky, a trained attorney, began studying painting in 1896 at 30. That same year, he attended a performance of Lohengrin, a Richard Wagner opera, which impacted him profoundly.
“In spirit I saw all my colors—they stood in front of my mind’s eye. Wild, almost mad lines, appeared before me,” he said of Lohengrin in his 1911 book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, per the New York Times. He realized that “painting could develop the same powers that music possessed.”
Kandinsky settled in Munich, where he studied under the painter Anton Ažbe and then at the Academy of Fine Arts. At the start of World War I, he returned to Moscow and continued his art practice, but he went back to Germany in the 1920s. He taught at the Bauhaus school until 1933, when the Nazis closed it, then relocated to France, where he spent the rest of his life and produced some of his greatest works. Over time, he explored shapes and colors on his canvases without attaching them to objects or traditional scenes.
“The Music of Colors” traces Kandinsky’s artistic development, opening with the story of his fateful encounter with Wagner’s music and crescendoing into three of his Compositions: Composition VIII (1923), on loan from New York’s Guggenheim; Composition IX (1936), from the Pompidou, which has one of the world’s largest Kandinsky collections; and Composition X (1939), which comes from the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Quick fact: How big are Kandinsky’s Compositions?
All three of the large-scale works on display—Composition VIII, Composition IX and Composition X—are between 75 and 80 inches long.
The exhibition is divided into 12 sections that emphasize how music influenced Kandinsky’s works. Some of his paintings carry names like Fugue and Improvisation; others are directly inspired by works of music, such as Impression III (Concert), Kandinsky’s response to an Arnold Schoenberg concert. Museumgoers wear headphones that automatically change the audio as they move from room to room, playing works by the likes of Schoenberg and Russian composer Alexander Scriabin to correspond with each section’s themes.
It’s not the first visual-auditory show at the Musée de la Musique. According to the Times, the museum has also put on musical exhibitions spotlighting Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
“I think the expertise of the Musée de la Musique lies in its ability to reflect on the links between music and the fine arts; it’s not just a question of biography or sensory parallels,” Marie-Pauline Martin, director of the Musée de la Musique and co-organizer of the Kandinsky show, tells the New York Times.
To come up with the Kandinsky soundtrack, Martin, Lampe and pianist Mikhail Rudy, who served as the show’s musical adviser, combed through the artist’s own rich record collection, part of which is in the Pompidou’s archive.
“The soundtrack to the exhibition is an interpretation,” Lampe tells the Financial Times. “We have his record collection as hints and some quotes and texts, but we know he never painted music directly.”
Even so, “The Music of Colors” may bring Kandinsky enthusiasts a little closer to how the artist experienced music, which some art historians have chalked up to synesthesia, a rare neurological phenomenon in which a person experiences strong links between sensory inputs like colors, sounds and taste. Kandinsky didn’t have an official diagnosis, but his own reflections point to an intense connection between sound and color.
Following the Schoenberg concert that directly inspired a painting, Kandinsky wrote to the composer in 1911, kicking off a friendship between the two artists. “The particular destinies,” Kandinsky wrote, “the autonomous paths, the very lives of individual voices in your compositions are precisely what I have been looking for in pictorial form.”
“Kandinsky: The Music of Colors” is on view at the Philharmonie de Paris’ Musée de la Musique through February 1, 2026.