Kandinsky And Maistre Analysis

The two artists I have chosen to write about in my essay are Wassily Kandinsky and Roy de Maistre. Both of these men are artists who were greatly influenced by the relationship between colour and sound and are thought to have pioneered the complete abstraction of art in each of their respective areas; Kandinsky is celebrated as the first artist to ever produce a entirely abstract work, while de Maistre is known as the one of the first Australian artists to use pure abstraction in his artwork. (Nairn & Serle, 1981)

Before delving into each of these artists separately, I would like to first discuss the idea of pure abstraction, as well as how I, as a member of the audience, feel about purely abstract art. Pictured above for reference is a watercolour

done by Kandinsky in 1910, and at first glance, it is a tumultous, noisy jumble of colours and shapes. This, to me, is the perfect example of abstract art. It confuses and unsettles its audience, as the brain scrambles to find patterns and recognisable natural symbols to associate these shapes with, but comes up completely empty-handed. Humanity relies greatly on its ability to locate and associate similarities. For example, the very foundation of the English language requires our brains to associate a specific series of letters with its specified meaning, which explains why we uphold ‘orderliness’ and ‘being well-organised’ as virtues or desired traits. We use order to make and uphold meaning; abstract art is the complete rebellion against everything that this orderliness represents. If order is tired, overused and commonplace, abstraction is refreshing, energetic and completely undefinable. As such, I found this essay question extremely difficult to answer satisfactorily. It seemed impossible to explain how Kandinsky or de Maistre had responded to their worlds to inspire or challenge their audience, as I could find no link between the otherwordly shapes in their art and the world we live in. Fortunately, further research provided me with an answer, one that I was greatly surprised and excited by: both of these artists drew deep inspiration from music. The rest of my essay will explain this correlation between these artists’ artwork and music, as well as how their artwork has inspired me, in further detail.
Wassily Kandinsky was born on December 4, 1866 in Moscow, to an affluent family. As a child, he received great exposure to the arts, learning how to play several instruments and inheriting an interest in drawing and painting from his parents. Kandinsky was supposedly chromesthetic, which means that he experienced sound whenever he saw colours, and vice versa. He once said that, in his childhood, he heard hissing sounds while mixing paints in his paintbox. This ability was further supported by his musical pursuits, as he described the cello that he played as “one of the deepest blues of all instruments” (Ward, 2006). This ability to link music and colour was to have had a profound influence on his artwork, as he so gracefully expressed: “…Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is a piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which, touching this or that key, makes the soul vibrate…” (Kandinsky & Rapelli, 1999)
At this point, it is important to note that Kandinsky was never medically diagnosed with synesthesia, or more specifically, chromesthesia (sound-colour synesthesia).

Synesthesia itself has only recently gained credibility as a neurological phenomenon after functional neuroimaging studies identified differences in patterns of brain activation (Hubbard & Ramachandran, 2005), as many have previously dismissed it as simply a side effect of an “overactive imagination”. As there was a lack of scientific research on synesthesia during Kandinsky’s time, there is not a lot of information on how, exactly, he associated colours and sounds. However, no matter how scientifically proven or unproven Kandinsky’s chromesthesia was, it is clear that he had quite an unusual relationship with music and colour, as shown by his extreme sensitivity to the use of colours in his artwork and references to colour-related sound (and vice versa) in the quotes given in the previous paragraph. This relationship was, in essence, Kandinsky’s method of responding to the world in his art.

In this oil-on-canvas painting by Kandinsky, titled “Yellow Red Blue”, the viewer immediately senses a warmth and vibrancy emanating from the picture. It consists of multiple shapes, lines and tones that are all uniquely different, yet somehow manage to form a cohesive whole. This serves to bring about an air of organised chaos, which may evoke emotions of

The link between music and art, in de Maistre’s case, is very different from that of Kandinsky’s art. Whereas Kandinsky was thought to have a natural proclivity to experiencing sound and colour simultaneously, de Maistre took a far more intentional, systematic

approach.