Wassily Kandinsky
Color is a power which directly influences the soul.Collection: Power
An empty canvas is a living wonder... far lovelier than certain pictures.Collection: Art
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?Collection: Work
To create a work of art is to create the world.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Age
There is no must in art because art is free.Collection: Art
Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.
The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural... The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.
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.
The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.
Each color lives by its mysterious life.
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.
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.
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.
Everything starts from a dot.
Our epoch is a time of tragic collision between matter and spirit and of the downfall of the purely material world view.
The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.
How can German music not be represented by an article?
The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects.Collection: Photography
Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Art
Color transmits and translates emotion.Collection: Color
Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.Collection: Real
The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.Collection: Spiritual
… 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?Collection: Inspiring
The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct its appeal.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Circles
Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow.Collection: Yellow
The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.Collection: Men
That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Dark
Art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul.Collection: Art
An empty canvas is a living wonder - far lovelier than certain pictures.Collection: Canvas
Color is a means to exert a direct influence on the soul.Collection: Mean
The joy of life consists in the inevitable, continual triumph of new values.Collection: Joy
Almost without exception, blue refers to the domain of abstraction and immateriality.Collection: Blue
Color cannot stand alone.Collection: Color
The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these 'walls around art.Collection: Art
Emotion that I experienced on first seeing the fresh paint come out of the tube.. ..the impression of colours strewn over the palette: of colours - alive, waiting, as yet unseen and hidden in their little tubes...Collection: Waiting
In place of an intensive cooperation among artists, there is a battle for goods. Hatred, partisanship, cliques, jealousy, and intrigues are the natural consequences of an aimless, materialist art.Collection: Jealousy
In your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my painting.Collection: Independent
The life of the spirit may be fairly represented in diagram as a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest segment uppermost. The lower the segment the greater it is in breadth, depth, and area.Collection: Depth
Absolute green is the most restful color, lacking any undertone of joy, grief, or passion. On exhausted men this restfulness has a beneficial effect, but after a time it becomes tedious.Collection: Grief
Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works.Collection: Art
The arts are encroaching one upon another, and from a proper use of this encroachment will rise the art that is truly monumental.Collection: Art
Efforts to revive the art principles of the past at best produce works of art that resemble a stillborn child.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Spiritual
When I was thirteen or fourteen I bought a paintbox with oil paints from money slowly saved up. The feeling I had at the time - or better - the experience of color coming slowly out of the tube - is with me to this day.Collection: Color
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.Collection: Eye
Painting took on a fabulous strength and splendor; the object was discredited as an indispensable element of the picture.Collection: Elements