Kandinsky Color Theory

Color Theory according to Wassily Kandinsky, from "Concerning the Spiritual in Art"

"Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.”

According to Kandinsky colour contains within itself a little studied but enormous power, which can influence the entire human body.

  
 
He beleived that color, like sound, evokes emotions. Along with other formal elements, such as line, shape, and form, color (like music) is a language that communicates to all.
Wassily Kandinsky was a prolific writer as well as painter. His writing "On the Spiritual in Art" (1912) is particularly enlightening in terms of the relationship between his spiritual aims.
The symbolist and expressionist aesthetic had provided a powerful stimulus for Kandinsky’s move into abstract art by encouraging his belief in the transitory nature of the material world and providing him with a mission of spiritual regeneration.
 

Color Communication

Kandinsky believed that the artists had an "inner necessity" to express the "inner essence of things". 

The main focus of his exploration of color was how it could be employed as an expression of the spiritual, he imagined it to act as a kind of intermediary between the viewer and the spiritual world.

He felt that each color had an inherent character defined by its relationship to its opposing color, for instance- plus/minus, warm/cool, active/passive, female/male, and believed that these characteristics, on a intuitive level and in certain combinations, could communicate an emotion or idea to the spectator.

“Two great divisions of colour occur to the mind at the outset: into warm and cold, and into light and dark. To each colour there are therefore four shades of appeal--warm and light or warm and dark, or cold and light or cold and dark.

Generally speaking, warmth or cold in a colour mean an approach respectively to yellow or to blue. This distinction is, so to speak, on one basis, the colour having a constant fundamental appeal, but assuming either a more material or more non-material quality. The movement is an horizontal one, the warm colours approaching the spectator, the cold ones retreating from him.

Yellow and blue have another movement which affects the first antithesis--an ex-and concentric movement. If two circles are drawn and painted respectively yellow and blue, brief concentration will reveal in the yellow a spreading movement out from the center, and a noticeable approach to the spectator.

The blue, on the other hand, moves in upon itself, like a snail retreating into its shell, and draws away from the spectator.

In the case of light and dark colours the movement is emphasized. That of the yellow increases with an admixture of white, i.e., as it becomes lighter."

  

MOVE TO ABSTRACTION

It was Kandinsky’s fascination with color, which he came to see as significant in its own right, which provided the immediate stimulus for his move to abstraction.

One evening he was startled by the sight of one of his own pictures, which was turned on its side so that he could not distinguish the objects, but which appeared "indescribably beautiful ....pervaded by an inner glow". The same painting seen by daylight, with clearly discernible objects, was far less beautiful, leading Kandinsky to the conclusion that objects harmed his pictures. He felt that the effect of the object interfered with that of the color, reducing its impact. Kandinsky believed that colors have an inherent character which sets up "vibrations with the soul". It was the spiritual force of color that most concerned him, he felt that through color he could "give artistic form to form to inner nature, i.e. Spiritual experience"
 
 
 

'"That of the blue increases with an admixture of black, i.e., as it becomes darker. This means that there can never be a dark-colored yellow. The relationship between white and yellow is as close as between black and blue, for blue can be so dark as to border on black. Besides this physical relationship, is also a spiritual one (between yellow and white on one side, between blue and black on the other) which marks a strong separation between the two pairs."
 
  An attempt to make yellow colder produces a green tint and checks both the horizontal and eccentric movement. The color becomes sickly and unreal. The blue by its contrary movement acts as a brake on the yellow, and is hindered in its own movement, till the two together become stationary, and the result is green. Similarly a mixture of black and white produces gray, which is motionless and spiritually very similar to green.  
 

Pure Color

Kandinsky’s aesthetic is rooted in Symbolist principles of artistic excellence. Color's effects were hierarchical, depending on the "level of [spiritual] development" of the individual.
People at a low stage of development experienced only fleeting "superficial" effects due to color, while those at a higher level experienced "a more profound effect, which occasions a deep emotional response. In such people, color "call[ed] forth a vibration from the soul." As with pure sound, pure color could, in the right people, communicate directly, unmediated by symbolic conventions.

Red, for example  "may cause a spiritual vibration like flame, since red is the color of flame. " Kandinsky's theory of synaesthesia posited that in synaesthetes sensory impressions were immediately communicated to the soul, making them like good, much-played violins, which vibrate in all their parts and fibers at every touch of the bow.
 
 

Kandinsky fancied himself one of these fine violins, and he followed with his own cross-sensory sensitivity to the haptic (prickly colors vs. smooth) and thermal (cold vs. warm) properties of colors.

"Whatever might eventually prove to be the correct set of correspondences for the "sensitive" soul, color was a "keyboard," and it was the artist's job to "purposefully set the soul vibrating by means of this or that key."

 
Kandinsky believed his experience of synaesthesia, the phenomena when the senses are not separate from each other and there is a direct transfer of reactions from one sense to another, so that one might ‘hear’ color and ‘see’ sounds, was inherently connected to his spiritualism. This idea was very likely to have been influenced by the Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner. According to Blavatsky, humankind was destined to enter an era of increasing spiritualization.
 

  Literature, music, and art, declared Kandinsky, would be the domains where this spiritual transformation would first become noticeable. All artistic genres were conceived of by Kandinsky as capable of producing trans-historical forms of aesthetic meaning for the "sensitive" soul; the more transparent the work of art was to a particular set of idiosyncratic cultural meanings, the more resonant it would be for such sensitives.
 

Rudolf Steiner argued that in a higher state of awareness sense impressions such as color, sound and smell could be experienced as creations of the soul or spirit, independently of objects in the real world. Steiner had introduced Kandinsky to the theories of Goethe, however, In ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ Kandinsky claims that his ideas depended upon ‘empirical-spiritual experience’ and not on any ‘positive science’.

As in Theosophy Kandinsky believed in a certain universal harmony underlying the apparent chaos of the natural world, and he felt a someone with a 'higher consciousness' could tap into this. "Art can only be great if it relates directly to cosmic laws and is subordinate to them. One senses these laws unconsciously if one approaches nature not outwardly,-but inwardly".
 
 

Kandinsky decided to test his theories with an experiment using the people of Weimer, were he lived, as the subjects. He sent out over one thousand postcards with the color red, blue and yellow and a triangle, square and circle, asking for them to be put into pairs. The result that came back, seemed to support his theory. A predominant number of people thought of a yellow triangle, red square and blue circle.
 
Nature or Colors

         
yellow :  “warm,” “cheeky and exciting,” “disturbing for people,” “typical earthly color,” “compared with the mood of a person it could have the effect of representing madness in color [...] an attack of rage, blind madness, maniacal rage.   loud, sharp trumpets, high fanfares
         
blue :  deep, inner, supernatural, peaceful “Sinking towards black, it has the overtone of a mourning that is not human.” “typical heavenly color”   light blue: flute
darker blue: cello
darkest blue of all: organ
         
green: mixture of yellow and blue
stillness, peace, but with hidden strength, passive
“Green is like a fat, very healthy cow lying still and unmoving, only capable of chewing the cud, regarding the world with stupid dull eyes.”   quiet, drawn-out, middle position violin
         
white :  "It is not a dead silence, but one pregnant with possibilities."   "Harmony of silence", "pause that breaks temporarily the melody"
         
black : “Not without possibilities [...] like an eternal silence, without future and hope.”
Extinguished, immovable   "final pause, after which any continuation of the melody seems the dawn of another world"
         
gray : mixture of white and black
“Immovability which is hopeless”   soundless
         
red :  alive, restless, confidently striving towards a goal, glowing, “manly maturity”
Light warm red: strength, energy, joy; vermilion: glowing passion, sure strength
Light cold red: youthful, pure joy, young  
"sound of a trumpet, strong, harsh"  Fanfare, Tuba deep notes on the cello high, clear violin
         
brown : mixture of red + black
dull, hard, inhibited    
         
orange :  mixture of red + yellow
radiant, healthy, serious   middle range church bell, alto voice, “an alto violin, singing tone, largo”
         
violet :  mixture of red + blue
“morbid, extinguished [...] sad"   english horn, Shawn, bassoon

 

 

More info: Concerning the Spiritual in Art

 

 

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