To Kandinsky’s Moment of Disorientation that Created Abstract Art

Kandinsky's "The Blue Rider." Before he made the leap to abstraction

He walked into the studio late, just to grab something on his way out. He wasn’t thinking about art, the empty canvas rolled in the corner, the paint on the table, the worry that kept him up last night that once he is finished with the piece he’s working on now, he won’t know what he will do next. Inspiration is both a matter of patience and effort. He was afraid he had little left of both.

Summer. Late-setting sun. A low window in the studio. He opened the door and on the ground, his box filled with tubes of paint. Next to it, a chair. The way the light hit them, he did not see “box” and “chair,” he saw “yellow.” He felt the space around the color as empty and the space in the color as full. He felt the weight of it all in his chest. When he glanced around the room, he saw the lines between the things disappear and the colors scored the evening.

Kandinsky's "Composition 2" often considered a turning point in his work and in abstract art

And then it quickly re-assembled. Easel (function), oil cloth (function), brush (function), vase (function). And me, he thought. Here, in this room. I paint (function). But is "painter" what I am? Is it what  I do, even?

Being human is more than the sum of our actions. He believed this. And if it’s true for people, it’s true for the world we live in, the world we love. And this is what he wanted to paint, not the visible: haystack, cafe scene in Paris, that beach in Southern France. He wanted to paint what was outside the visible, underneath the visible, deep within the visible: all the other ways we know the things around us, all the other ways we know ourselves.

He pulled out the color and painted the color, not the lines that contained the color. He composed more than he painted, harmonized more than blended, improvised more than sketched. He painted spirit to spirit, because if music, the very abstraction of sound, could move us closer to heaven, then color could do the same. Look at the greeen. Dream of the yellows. Study everything in the red. Let the blue speak. It has the voice of God. Wordless.

Kandinsky's "Composition X." He believed paintings could be composed like music.