Wassily Kandinsky As A Prophet Of The Multimedia Age

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By Kathleen Karlsen

A significant number of artists and musicians in the late nineteenth century assumed a fundamental connection between color and sound. Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), one of the most well known modern artists and esthetic philosophers and of his day, believed unequivocally in the link between color and sound. Kandinsky himself was a synesthete, a person who involuntarily experiences unusual connections between the senses.

In his work of 1914, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, Kandinsky postulated that cross-associations among the senses exist in all highly sensitive people. Kandinsky stated that sense impressions are communicated "immediately to the soul, and thence to the other organs of sense". He boldly asserts, "The sound of colours is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would try to express bright yellow in the bass notes". For Kandinsky, yellow is the shrill sound of a trumpet, green is a violin, light blue is a flute, a darker blue is a cello, a darker blue is a thunderous bass, and the darkest blue of all is an organ. White, Kandinsky believed, is the color of silence, and corresponds directly to the pauses that occur in musical rhythms.

Kandinsky does points out some distinctions between the two major creative art forms-art and music. On the one hand, Kandinsky states, music is not bound by reliance on visual geometric structure. On the other hand, music requires time for the communication to be completed. In contrast with this, painting requires the arrangement of images in definite patterns but can also "present to the spectator the whole content of its message at one moment".

In spite of these differences, Kandinsky proposed important implications for the future of the arts based the general parallels between color and music. He saw the drawing together of these two primary arts as a positive development from which "will rise the art that is truly monumental". Kandinsky, then, was a prominent prophet predicting the rise of multimedia art forms in the modern age.

Kathleen Karlsen, MA is a professional artist, a freelance writer and design consultant residing in Bozeman, Montana. Her unique artwork and gifts for flower lovers can be found at http://www.livingartsoriginals.com . For an illustrated article on flower symbolism, see http://www.livingartsoriginals.com/infoflowersymbolism.htm . More about flower meanings are at http://www.livingartsoriginals.com/infoflowermeaning.htm .

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