Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art

‘And so the arts are encroaching one upon another, and from this will rise the art that is truly monumental.’
– Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning Spirituality in Art (1912)

In this short from the YouTube channel Listening In, the UK video essayist Barnaby Martin explores the evolution of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) from a young law and economics teacher to one of the foremost artists and theorists of the avant-garde movement. In particular, Martin focuses on how Kandinsky’s synaesthesia – in which he heard music when he saw colours, and vice versa – influenced his desire to create abstract imagery that grew increasingly disconnected from representations of objects. Integrating Kandinsky’s paintings, writings and the music with which his work intersected in the early 20th century, the piece makes for a dazzling audiovisual dive into the philosophy behind this artist’s iconic images and, by extension, many of the ideas that have propelled the abstract art movement up to today.