The exhibition “Kandinsky. The Music of Colours” at the Philharmonie de Paris examines the profound, life-long connection between Vassily Kandinsky’s art and music. In 1896, a 30-year-old Kandinsky, then an aspiring law professor, attended a performance of Wagner's "Lohengrin" at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater. It proved to be a transformative experience, which inspired him to move to Munich and pursue a career as a painter, believing painting could achieve the same expressive power as music.
Drawing primarily from the Centre Pompidou's extensive Kandinsky collection while that institution undergoes renovation, the exhibition features nearly 200 artworks and objects.
At the entrance of the exhibition you receive a set of geolocated headphones that shift seamlessly between musical excerpts and artist quotations as you move through the exhibition galleries. This immersive approach reflects Kandinsky’s habit of drawing analogies between auditory and visual experiences. His personal archive provides a major source of the exhibition: nearly a hundred shellac records, along with manuscripts, annotated scores, and books, reveal the eclectic musical tastes that influenced his thinking, from Bach to Stravinsky to Russian Orthodox chants.
A series of thematic sections traces Kandinsky’s evolution from his early Munich years with Der Blaue Reiter through his time at the Bauhaus. The exhibition emphasizes that his experimentation with bold chromatic harmonies, rhythmic pictorial structures, and synesthetic correspondences was both spiritually motivated and analytically rigorous. In 1911 Kandinsky attended a concert featuring Schoenberg’s “String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10” (1907-8), which proved to be as big a shock as Wagner’s “Lohengrin” and inspired him to create “Impression III (Concert)” (1911). It was a joy to hear the music on the headset as you enter the gallery and look at the painting.
The exhibition also situates Kandinsky within broader currents of early 20th-century art. His collaborations with musicians such as Thomas von Hartmann, his theoretical writings, including Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Point and Line to Plane, and his experiments with stage design, notably the 1928 production of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”, illustrate Kandinsky’s pursuit of “total art.” His attraction to abstraction, the curators argue, stemmed in part from music’s status as an art form in which meaning is conveyed without reliance on the visible world.
While the exhibition ranges across decades, it highlights Kandinsky’s enduring connection to Russia, which he once called his “pictorial tuning fork.” Orthodox chants, reminiscences of Moscow’s architecture, and the emotional timbre of his homeland permeate several early works. Even as he worked in Germany and France, he remained attuned to what he described as the “inner sound” of the places and cultures that shaped him. His synesthetic understanding of colour also reflects his sense that visual forms could carry both musical and metaphysical resonance.
The exhibition culminates in the rare reunion of Kandinsky’s final three Compositions: No. VIII from the Guggenheim Museum in New York, No. IX from the Centre Pompidou and No. X from the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. These monumental paintings, each a kind of symphonic statement, demonstrate how thoroughly Kandinsky had internalized musical logic as a structural model. Displayed together, they form a wonderful trilogy that mirrors musical form, moving from jubilant complexity to contemplative calm and finally toward a cosmic finale. In presenting these masterpieces alongside sound, archival material, and set designs, the exhibition argues that music did not merely inspire Kandinsky; it provided the conceptual blueprint for his lifelong quest to reinvent painting as a fully abstract art.
Kandinsky, la musique des couleurs is at the Musée de la Musique at the Philharmonie de Paris until 1 February 2026.