Wassily Kandinsky Quotes (1866-1944)

“[Their] things [works of Die Brücke artists] must be exhibited. But I think it is incorrect to immortalize them in the document [Almanac?] of our modern art (and, this is what our book ought to be) or as a more or less decisive, leading factor. At any rate I am against large reproductions [for Die Brücke paintings in The Blaue Reiter Almanac].”

“In this painting ['Moscow'], 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.”

“[Schonberg's] music leads us into a realm where musical experience is a matter not of the ear but of the soul alone, and at this point the music of the future begins.”

“Frankly, I think there is something wrong with Jawlensky's dots [in his paintings, then]. Anybody can pick up that style if they want to.”

“I thought that the painter had no right to paint so un-clearly.. ..(but) the first faint doubt as to the importance of an 'object' as the necessary element in painting.. [ Kandinsky is remembering here his early experience when he saw one of the 'Haystack' paintings of Monet for the first time in his life, in Moscow, c. 1895].”

“Kandinsky understood 'Form' as a form, like an object in the real world; and an object, he said, was a narrative—and so, of course, he disapproved of it. He wanted his 'music without words'. He wanted to be 'simple as a child.' He intended, with his 'inner-self,' to rid himself of 'philosophical barricades' (he sat down and wrote something about all this). But in turn his own writing has become a philosophical barricade, even if it is a barricade full of holes. It offers a kind of Middle-European idea of Buddhism or, anyhow, something too theosophic for me.”

“Total abstraction was something intellectual to me. I didn't feel it.. ..I would go to the old Guggenheim [museum] to look at Kandinsky. I liked the early abstractions [in his Murneau period] but the later ones I didn't like at all.”

“Kandinsky and Klee: the two artists.. ..have been named together more and more frequently.. .Since: is it supposed to be a mere coincidence that, in quiet, remote Dessau.. ..two creative spirits equally liberated from the burden of earthly problems – connecting East and West – live under one roof, or is it a wake-up call, a sign of what is to come?!”

“Yesterday was shaped by Kandinsky's move.. .This departure is what proves something for me.. .It is a friendship that overcomes a number of negative items, because the plus side stands firm and, in particular, because there is a link to my productive youth [in Munich].”

“In your works, I sense primeval, bygone things wedded with mystical vibrations of spiritual possibilities for the future.”

“Can you imagine a music in which tonality (that is, the adherence to any key) is completely suspended? I was constantly reminded of Kandinsky's large composition which also permits no trace of tonality.. ..and also of Kandinsky's 'jumping spots' in hearing this music [of Schönberg ], which allows each tone sounded to stand on its own (a kind of white canvas between the spots of color). Schönberg proceeds from the principle that the concepts of consonance and dissonance do not exist at all. A so-called dissonance is only a mere remote consonance – an idea which now occupies me constantly while painting..”