Explore Quotes by Wassily Kandinsky

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

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.

Our epoch is a time of tragic collision between matter and spirit and of the downfall of the purely material world view.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

Each color lives by its mysterious life.

How can German music not be represented by an article?

The spirit, like the body, can be strengthened and developed by frequent exercise. Just as the body, if neglected, grows weaker and finally impotent, so the spirit perishes if untended.

Color is a power which directly influences the soul.

With few exceptions, music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist's soul, in musical sound.

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.

Every artist, as child of his age, is impelled to express the spirit of his age.

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.

Art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul.

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.

It is essential that the painter should develop not only his eyes, but also his soul, so that it too may be capable of weighing colors in balance.

Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings.

The arts are encroaching one upon another, and from a proper use of this encroachment will rise the art that is truly monumental.

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.

The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects.

Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated.

Generally speaking, color directly influences the soul.