Best 93 quotes of Wassily Kandinsky on MyQuotes

Absolute green is the most restful color, lacking any undertone of joy, grief, or passion. On exhausted men this restfulness has a beneficial effect, but after a time it becomes tedious.

Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world.

All methods are sacred if they are internally necessary. All methods are sins if they are not justified by internal necessity.

Almost without exception, blue refers to the domain of abstraction and immateriality.

An empty canvas, apparently really empty, that says nothing and is without significance – almost dull, in fact – in reality, is crammed with thousands of undertone tensions and full of expectancy. Slightly apprehensive lest it should be outraged.

An empty canvas is a living wonder - far lovelier than certain pictures.

A parallel between color and music can only be relative – just as a violin can give warm shades of tone, so yellow has shades, which can be expressed by various instruments.

Art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul.

As a picture painted in yellow always radiates spiritual warmth, or as one in blue has apparently a cooling effect, so green is only boring.

A world of colors on the palette remaining... wandering... on canvases still emerging.

Barriers are continually being made out of... new values which have overturned the barriers of the past. Thus one sees that it is not basically the new value that is of prime importance, but rather the spirit that is revealed in this value, as well as the freedom necessary for this revelation.

Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.

Color cannot stand alone.

Color is a means to exert a direct influence on the soul.

Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings.

Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.

Colors produce a spiritual vibration, the impression they create is important only as a step towards this vibration.

Color transmits and translates emotion.

Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.

Doubts must be resolved alone within the soul. Otherwise one would profane one's own powerful solution.

Drawing instruction is a training towards perception, exact observation and exact presentation not of the outward appearances of an object, but of its constructive elements, its lawful forces-tensions, which can be discovered in given objects and of the logical structures of same-education toward clear observation and clear rendering of the contexts, whereby surface phenomena are an introductory step towards the three-dimensional.

Each color lives by its mysterious life.

Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works.

Efforts to revive the art principles of the past at best produce works of art that resemble a stillborn child.

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...

Empty canvas. In appearance - really empty, silent, indifferent. Stunned, almost. In effect - full of tensions, with thousand subdued voices, heavy with expectations. A little frightened because it may be violated

Every man who steeps himself in the spiritual possibilities of his heart is a valuable helper in the building of the spiritual pyramid which will someday reach to heaven.

Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not arbitrary, but are bound up with the phenomenon – developing out of its nature and characteristics : Externally – or – inwardly.

Everything shows me its face, its innermost being, its secret soul, which is more often silent than heard.

Everything starts from a dot.

Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street... Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.

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.

Every work of art is the child of its time, often it is the mother of our emotions.

Generally speaking, color directly influences the soul.

I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife, and I made them sing with all the intensity I could.

I let myself go. I thought little of the houses and trees, but applied colour stripes and spots to the canva... Within me sounded the memory of early evening in Moscow, before my eyes was the strong, colour-saturated scale of the Munich light and atmosphere, which thundered deeply in the shadows.

In every painting a whole is mysteriously enclosed, a whole life of tortures, doubts, of hours of enthusiasm and inspiration.

In general, therefore, color is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.

In place of an intensive cooperation among artists, there is a battle for goods. Hatred, partisanship, cliques, jealousy, and intrigues are the natural consequences of an aimless, materialist art.

In the hierarchy of colors, green represents the social middle class, self-satisfied, immovable, narrow.

In their pursuit of the same supreme end, Matisse and Picasso stand side by side, Matisse representing color and Picasso form.

In your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my painting.

It is essential that the painter should develop not only his eyes, but also his soul, so that it too may be capable of weighing colors in balance.

It should not be forgotten that art is not a science where the latest 'correct' theory declares the old to be false and erases it.

I value those artists who embody the expression of their life.

… lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and … stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to “walk about” into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?

Objects damage pictures.

Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

Only just now awakening after years of materialism, our soul is still infected with the despair born of unbelief, of lack of purpose and aim.