Wassily Kandinsky Quotes
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We do not want to leave Germany forever. Something I would not be able to manage at all, since my roots sit too deep in German soil.
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At the appointed time, necessities become ripe. That is the time when the Creative Spirit (which one can also designate as the Abstract Spirit) finds an avenue to the soul, later to other souls, and causes a yearning, an inner urge.
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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.
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..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..
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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.
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Our epoch is a time of tragic collision between matter and spirit and of the downfall of the purely material world view.
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..the long Russian word for creation: 'proisvedenie' - so different from its shorter counterparts in English, French and German - expresses for me the whole history and process of creation, lengthy, mysterious, infinitely complex and foreshadowed by divine predestination.
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Each color lives by its mysterious life.
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Frankly, I think there is something wrong with Jawlensky's dots in his paintings, then. Anybody can pick up that style if they want to.
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The horse carries the rider with power and speed. But the rider controls the horse. Talent carries the artist to great heights with power and speed. But the artist directs his talent. That is the element of 'consciousness', of 'calculation' in the work – or whatever else one chooses to call it.
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Color is a power which directly influences the soul.
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The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.
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I thought that the painter had no right to paint so unclearly.. ..(but) the first faint doubt as to the importance of an 'object' as the necessary element in painting.
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..the works of Mozart. They create a welcome pause amidst the storms of our inner life, a vision of consolation and hope, but we hear them like sounds of another, vanished and essential unfamiliar age. Clashing discords, loss of equilibrium..
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Mystery, speaking through mysteries. Insn't that meaning? Isn't that the conscious or unconsciousnes purpose of the compulsive urge to create?
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The destruction of the atom the split of it, in modern physics seemed to me to be the same as the destruction of the world.. ..science to me appeared to be dead: its most important basis was only a lunacy, a mistake perpetrated by learned men.. ..who blindly mistook one object for another.
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The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life.
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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.
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Well, we will indeed see how things develop and what will become of our art! In any case, artists should remain apolitical and only think of their work and dedicate all their energies to this work.
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It is never literally true that any form is meaningless and 'says nothing.' Every form in the world says something. But its message often fails to reach us, and even if it does, full understanding is often withheld from us. and, properly speaking, FORM IS THE OUTWARD EXPRESSION OF THIS INNER MEANING.
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I am working again on my painting 'Moscow' 'Moscow I' ('Mockba I'), 1916. It is slowly taking shape in my imagination. And what was in the realm of wishing is now assuming real forms. What I have been lacking with this idea was depth and richness of sound, very earnest, complex, and easy at the same time.
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An empty canvas is a living wonder... far lovelier than certain pictures.
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Of the 16 years that I have been living in Germany, I have given myself entirely to the German art world. How am I now suddenly supposed to feel myself a foreigner?
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At that time c. 1904 – 1905 I tried, by means of lines and by distribution of mottled points of colours in his tempera painting on paper: 'Russian Beauty in a Landscape', 1905 to express the musical spirit of Russia. Other pictures of that period reflected the contradictions and later the eccentricities of Russia.