The fascinating links between the work of the Russian painter and music are at the heart of “Kandinsky, the music of colors”. An immersive exhibition to discover until February 1 at the Philharmonie de Paris.
What if you could see the music? This is the disturbing experience offered by the exhibition “Kandinsky, the music of colors” at the Philharmonie de Paris. The result of a collaboration between the Music Museum and the Center Pompidou, this retrospective of nearly 200 works immerses the public in the synesthetic universe of the Russian painter, for whom sounds and colors were strongly linked.
Upon entry, visitors receive an audio headset which broadcasts a soundtrack adapted to each section of the exhibition. An ingenious way of recreating the sensory experience that changed the life of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and placing his work in the musical effervescence of his time.
It all started with Wagner
The story begins in 1896, when Kandinsky, then promised a career as a lawyer, attended a performance of Wagner’s opera “Lohengrin” at the Bolshoi. That evening, something changes: while listening to the violins and the deep bass of the orchestra, he sees colors. This revelation will change the course of his life and the history of art.
Coming from a cultured family from Moscow and Odessa, the young Kandinsky already played the cello and the harmonium as an amateur. But this “Wagner shock”, as he himself called it, acted as a revealer of his artistic vocation. He will develop a real theory of correspondences between colors and instruments. Thus, light blue evokes the flute, yellow the trumpet and green the violin.
But beyond these correspondences, it is also a whole musical vocabulary that he will transpose into his painting. The word “composition” itself, which he used to title his major works, acted on him, in his words, “like a prayer”.
A journey through his artistic evolution
The exhibition does not just illustrate Kandinsky’s synesthesia. It retraces several decades of his artistic development, from Russian landscapes to the latest “Compositions”, showing how his thinking was refined through contact with avant-garde musicians: Scriabin, Schönberg, Stravinsky or even his close collaborators such as Thomas von Hartmann and Sergei Taneyev.
These exchanges nourished his famous series of “Improvisations” and “Compositions”, where the painter reinvents the pictorial language by following the abstract model of music. A contemporary of Mussorgsky and the new Russian musical schools, Kandinsky also draws on the folklore of his native country to enrich his palette.
A room called “The Listening Eye” reveals the painter’s discotheque: from synagogue songs to Strauss waltzes, including Bach. Kandinsky literally lived in a world where music and colors were in constant dialogue. He even went so far as to ask those close to him to talk about music in terms of colors!
Making an artist known to be difficult accessible
The exhibition also presents Kandinsky’s most ambitious projects. There we discover in particular an optophonic piano which projects colored shapes, his drawings for a visual spectacle on Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”, recreated on video, or the Music Room which he designed for the Berlin architecture exhibition in 1931.
A dive into the world of Kandinsky which succeeds in making accessible, whether you are a modern art lover, a music lover or simply curious, an artist known to be difficult, by showing how his quest for the artistic absolute was rooted in a concrete sensory experience.
Subject radio: David Christoffel
Web adaptation: Andréanne Quartier-la-Tente
“Kandinsky, the music of colors”, Philharmonie de Paris, until February 1, 2026.