More than 200 works among paintings, drawings, documents and personal objects reveal the importance of music in Kandinsky’s artistic journey
There is a moment in Vassily Kandinsky’s life when everything changes forever: one evening in 1896, in Moscow, the young law student attends Wagner’s Lohengrin. The notes overwhelm him, the music turns into vision. From that revelation is born both an artist and an idea destined to revolutionize modern art: painting is melody, it can express emotions and inner states without imitating nature. Until February 1, 2026, the Philharmonie de Paris, in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou - itself undergoing transformation ahead of its reopening in 2030 - dedicates a major exhibition to this intertwining of the arts: “Kandinsky. The music of colors”. More than two hundred works among paintings, drawings, documents and personal artifacts trace how music became for Kandinsky a secret language, capable of freeing painting from the constraints of reality and leading it toward abstraction. The event brings together prestigious loans from international institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Beyeler Foundation.
He regarded Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal music as “spiritual rather than acoustic”
The exhibition opens with an audiovisual reconstruction of the “Wagner shock”, and continues through sections devoted to the memory of Russia, to the Improvisations and Compositions, the two creative poles Kandinsky envisioned for painting in relation to music and to his dialogue with Arnold Schoenberg, whose atonal music he considered “spiritual rather than acoustic”. There are also references to the Almanach der Blauen Reiter, the manifesto of the unity of the arts, to the poetic book “Klänge”, in which the painter explored the “pure sound” of words and to his two seminal theoretical texts, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” and “Point and Line to Plane”, conceived between 1910 and his Bauhaus years in the 1920s. An entire section is devoted to his theatrical and scenographic experiments, including a reimagining of Pictures at an Exhibition by the Russian composer Mussorgsky and a digital reconstruction of the Salon de musique (1931), created in collaboration with the H5 collective.
References abound to his key writings: “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” and “Point and Line to Plane”
Each room is accompanied by a soundscape: Wagner, Scriabin, Bach and Stravinsky converse with the canvases in a concert of forms and colors. Visitors can listen, touch and experiment; workshops for children, tactile pathways and multisensory devices make Kandinsky’s universe accessible to all. “Kandinsky. The music of colors” is more than an exhibition: it is a synesthetic experience, a silent concert where each canvas vibrates like a score. And it reminds us that, for Kandinsky, color was not only to be looked at: it was to be heard.
More than an exhibition, it is a synesthetic experience, a silent concert where the canvas vibrates like a musical score
