Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (Russian: Васи́лий Васи́льевич Канди́нский, tr. Vasily Vasilyevich Kandinsky) (16 December [O.S. 4 December] 1866 – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist.
The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.
The world is full of resonances. It constitutes a cosmos of things exerting a spiritual action. The dead matter is a living spirit.
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.
Our epoch is a time of tragic collision between matter and spirit and of the downfall of the purely material world view.
The impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle produces an effect no less powerful than the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo.
The artist is not a 'Sunday child' for whom everything immediately succeeds. He does not have the right to live without duty. The task that is assigned to him is painful, it is a heavy cross for him to bear.
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.
Doubts must be resolved alone within the soul. Otherwise one would profane one's own powerful solution.
The eyes are hammers.
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.
Whether the psychological effect of color is direct. . . or whether it is the outcome of association, is open to question. The soul being one with the body, it may well be possible that a psychological tremor generates corresponding one through association.
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.
An empty canvas is a living wonder — far lovelier than certain pictures.
The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects.
Generally speaking, color directly influences the soul.
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.
Color is a means to exert a direct influence on the 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.
Almost without exception, blue refers to the domain of abstraction and immateriality.
An empty canvas, apparently really empty, that says nothing and is without significance – almost dull, in fact – in reality, is crammed with thousands of undertone tensions and full of expectancy. Slightly apprehensive lest it should be outraged.