Exhibition

Kandinsky

Name: Kandinsky - La musique des couleurs
Start: 2025-10-15
End: 2026-02-01

La musique des couleurs

15 Oct 2025 - 1 Feb 2026

Philharmonie de Paris, Paris

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Vassily Kandinsky, « FUGA », 1914 (détail). Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Collection Beyeler - Domaine public. Photo © Robert Bayer

The Centre Pompidou and the Musée de la Musique – Philharmonie de Paris have joined forces to design and produce a major exhibition on the imagery of music in the work of Wassily Kandinsky.

Vassily Kandinsky, « FUGA », 1914 (détail). Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Collection Beyeler - Domaine public. Photo © Robert Bayer

Sheet music, records, books, tools… This exhibition-cum-event brings together nearly 200 works by the master and objects from his studio (from the Centre Pompidou and international collections), all of which express the fundamental role of music in his daily life, his vocation as an artist and the evolution of his practice towards abstraction.
The exhibition reveals an imaginary studio that manifests Wassily Kandinsky’s melomania. Sheet music he acquired, books and musical literature he collected, photos of his musician friends and his record collection, including the popular songs he was fond of, were essential parts of his artistic culture. At the heart of the studio is a collection of tools from Kandinsky’s own studio that questions the musicality of his creative process, particularly his work on the “sound” of colours and his visual studies of Beethoven’s fifth symphony.

A contemporary of Mussorgsky and the new music schools inspired by Russian folklore, Kandinsky (1866-1944) grew up in Moscow and Odessa in a cultivated family; as an amateur cellist and reed organist, he was soon captivated by Wagner. Beyond the expectations of his bourgeois upbringing, music had an eye-opening role. He himself affirmed that it nurtured and defined his artistic vocation. Above all, the abstract language of music gave the painter scope to question the principle of nature’s imitation, to the point of bringing about its dissolution. While refining his thoughts among such avant-garde musicians as Nikolai Kulbin, Sergei Taneyev and Thomas de Hartmann, Kandinsky reinvented the language of painting based on the abstract model of music, as demonstrated most clearly in his Improvisations and Compositions series.

Until now, no exhibition has placed the painter's output, from Russian landscapes to his last Compositions, in the context of the vibrant musical scene of his time. Yet there is no doubt that the compositions of Alexander Scriabin, Thomas de Hartmann, Arnold Schönberg and Igor Stravinsky defined the range of listening for pictorial modernity and abstraction. From the “Wagner shock” that Kandinsky experienced in 1896 in Moscow to his theatrical and choreographic experiments at the Bauhaus where he taught from 1922, the exhibition offers a fresh perspective on the painter’s works through subtle interplay between music, forms and colours during an immersive journey with a headset.
Exhibition co-organised by the Musée de la Musique - Philharmonie de Paris and the Centre Pompidou

€15 / Concessions: €11 / €9

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