Chaos in Form and Color Yields to Harmony

sky strove “to evoke sound through sight and create the painterly equivalent of a symphony that would stimulate not just the eyes but the ears as well.” One of the great artists of the early 20th century, Kandinsky was born on December 4, 1866, in Moscow to well-educated, upperclass parents. From a young age, he exhibited interest in and sensitivity to sound and color. Although he attended drawing and music classes during his childhood, Kandinsky pursued law, ethnography, and economics when he enrolled at the University of Moscow in 1886. A decade later he abandoned a career in teaching law to attend art school in Munich, Germany, where he met other like-minded young artists and co-founded “Phalanx,” an art school that spurned traditionalist approaches and conventions. Ward notes that Kandinsky is believed to have had synesthesia and to have the experience of hearing color and seeing sound. Synesthesia is a mingling of sensory input in which stimulation in one sense, such as hearing, concurrently and consistently stimulates a sensation in another sense, e.g., vision or taste. Kandinsky often drew from the lexicon of music in naming or describing his works as compositions, impressions, and improvisations. Neurologist and author Richard E. Cytowic states that “Kandinsky was among the first to step off the path of representation that Western art had followed for 500 years, and his model for this new ‘symbolic’ form of art was music.” For the last 11 years of his life, Kandinsky lived in Paris. During those years, according to his Centre Pompidou biography, “Kandinsky painted and drew prolifically, putting together an important body of work in which the common factor is the inspiration of images from biology, forms resembling embryos, larvae, or invertebrates, a minuscule population embodying the living.” This body of work, dubbed biomorphic abstraction, contrasts with the artist’s earlier abstract compositions that often featured straight lines, precise circles, and sharp angles.1 Art historian and painter Hajo Düchting