45 Wassily Kandinsky Quotes

Wassily Kandinsky quotes

1. But, as well as the body, the spirit fortifies itself and develops itself by the exercise. As a neglected body which becomes weak and finally impotent, the spirit becomes weaker. The innate feeling of the artist is like the talent of the Gospel which must not be buried. The artist which lets its gifts unemployed is the lazy servant.

2. Painting is an art, and the art in its whole is not a vain objets creation which get lost in the void, but a power which has a goal and must serve to the evolution and to the refinement of the human soul, to the moving of the Triangle. It is the language which speaks to the soul, in its proper form, of things which are the daily bread of the soul and which it can receive only under this form.

3. Is beautiful what proceeds from an inner necessity of the soul. Is beautiful what is inwardly beautiful.

4. Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the strings.The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

5. Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not arbitrary, but are bound up with the phenomenon - developing out of its nature and characteristics : Externally - or - inwardly.

6. The geometric point is an invisible thing. Therefore, it must be defined as an incorporeal thing. Considered in terms of substance, it equals zero. [:] Thus we look upon the geometric point as the ultimate and most singular union of silence and speech. The geometric point has, therefore, been given its material form, in the first instance, in writing. It belongs to language and signifies silence.

7. The geometric line is an invisible thing. It is the track made by the moving point; that is, its product. It is created by movement - specifically through the destruction of the intense self-contained repose of the point. Here, the leap out of the static to the dynamic occurs. [:] The forces coming from without which transform the point into a line, can be very diverse. The variation in lines depends upon the number of these forces and upon their combinations.

8. In this painting, I was in fact in quest for a certain hour, which was and which remains always the most beautiful hour of the day in Moscow. The sun is already low and has reached its highest force, which it has searched all the day, to which it has aspired all the day. [:] The sun dissolves all Moscow in a spot which, as a frenzied tuba, makes entered into vibration all the inner being, the whole soul. [:] Rendering this hour seemed the biggest, the most impossible of the happiness for an artist. These impressions renewed every sunny day. They brought me a joy which shattered me until the bottom of the soul, and which reached until ecstasy.

9. The world is full of resonances. It constitutes a cosmos of things exerting a spiritual action. The dead matter is a living spirit.

10. Art, like love, has a fine detail to it. You need to know exactly what is going on.

11. What is right artistically can only be attained through feeling.

12. My predilection for what is hidden,for the mysterious,saved me from the unhappy influence of popular art.

13. Art has much in common with religion.

14. Both of us loved blue, Franz Marc horses, I riders. Hence the name Der Blaue Reiter.(The Blue Rider)

15. Just because an artist uses 'abstract methods' ,it does not mean he is an 'abstract' artist.It does not even mean he is an artist.

16. A work of art consists of two elements,the inner and outer. The inner is the emotion in the soul of the artist...it has the capacity to evoke similar emotions in the observer..it must exist otherwise the work of art is a sham.

17. There is no must in art because art is free.

18. The purpose of my book concerning the 'Spiritual in Art' and 'Der Blaue Reiter was to awaken the ability to experience the spiritual in material and abstract things..the desire to bring out this joyful ability in people who don't have it..it was the main purpose of both publications.

19. The medieval pictures I painted were inspired by the impressions of old Schwabing.

20. Let the viewer stroll around within the picture,to force him to forget himself and so to become a part of the picture.

21. I more or less dissolved the objects(in my improvisations) so that not all of them could be recognised at once,so that the spiritual overtones could be gradually experienced by the viewer one after the other...and here and there even purely abstract forms came in of their own accord,in other words,that had to have a purely painterly effect.

22. As has been said...it is impossible to make clear the aims of a work of art by means of words.

23. I only want to paint good,necessary,living pictures,which are experienced properly by at least a few viewers.

24. I saw all my colours in spirit.Wild,almost mad lines drew themselves in front of me.(On seeing Wagner's Lohengrin)

25. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings. (Comparing Painting and Music)

1. Drawing instruction is a training towards perception, exact observation and exact presentation not of the outward appearances of an object, but of its constructive elements, its lawful forces-tensions, which can be discovered in given objects and of the logical structures of same-education toward clear observation and clear rendering of the contexts, whereby surface phenomena are an introductory step towards the three-dimensional.

2. Colors produce a spiritual vibration, the impression they create is important only as a step towards this vibration.

3. Color is a means to exert a direct influence on the soul.

4. In their pursuit of the same supreme end, Matisse and Picasso stand side by side, Matisse representing color and Picasso form.

5. An empty canvas, apparently really empty, that says nothing and is without significance – almost dull, in fact – in reality, is crammed with thousands of undertone tensions and full of expectancy. Slightly apprehensive lest it should be outraged.

6. The artist must be blind to distinction between 'recognized' or 'unrecognized' conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age.

7. All methods are sacred if they are internally necessary. All methods are sins if they are not justified by internal necessity.

8. Generally speaking, color directly influences the soul.

9. The sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble...

10. Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world.

11. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.

12. Everything shows me its face, its innermost being, its secret soul, which is more often silent than heard.

13. A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.

14. Those [things] that we encounter for the first time immediately have a spiritual effect upon us. A child, for whom every object is new, experiences the world in this way: it sees light, is attracted by it, wants to grasp it, burns its finger in the process, and thus learns fear and respect for the flame.

15. The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.

16. Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

17. Only just now awakening after years of materialism, our soul is still infected with the despair born of unbelief, of lack of purpose and aim.

18. The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul, so that it can weigh colours in its own scale and thus become a determinant in artistic creation.

19. Today is the great day of one of the revelations of this world. The interrelationships of these individual realms were illumined as by a flash of lightning; they burst unexpected, frightening, and joyous out of the darkness. Never were they so strongly tied together and never so sharply divided...

20. The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.