Friday, January 24, 2014

Kandinsky and Music

“...lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and … stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to “walk about” into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?”
-- Wassily Kandinsky (Russian painter, 1866 - 1944)

"Kandinsky was fascinated by music's emotional power. Because music expresses itself through sound and time, it allows the listener a freedom of imagination, interpretation, and emotional response that is not based on the literal or the descriptive, but rather on the abstract quality that painting, still dependent on representing the visible world, could not provide... Music can respond and appeal directly to the artist's "internal element" and express spiritual values, thus for Kandinsky it is a more advanced art...Wagner's Lohengrin, which had stirred Kandinsky to devote his life to art, had convinced him of the emotional powers of music..."
-- Excerpted from "Kandinsky: Compositions", by Magdalena Dabrowski

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