When painting becomes rhythm, tension and inner necessity.
Vassily Kandinsky interests me not only as one of the great pioneers of abstraction. He accompanies me because throughout his life he sought to understand how a form, line or colour can act inwardly without needing to represent the visible world.
A life in motion
Born in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky first studied law and economics before leaving that path to devote himself to art. In Munich, he took part in the adventure of the Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc. After the First World War and a return to Russia, he taught at the Bauhaus, where his painting became more constructed and geometric. When the Nazi regime closed the school in 1933, he settled in France and continued working in Neuilly-sur-Seine until his death in 1944.
Impression III (Concert) — 1911
This work arose after a concert by the composer Arnold Schoenberg that Kandinsky attended in January 1911. Yet the painting does not truly illustrate the scene. Kandinsky transforms the musical experience into relationships of colour, masses and tensions.
The vast yellow field acts like a luminous vibration. The large black form may evoke the piano, while the other forms suggest the audience. Yet nothing is fixed. The painting does not narrate the concert; it seeks to recover its inner intensity.
It is here that painting and music truly begin to meet. A colour can enter like a note. A line can create tension. An open space can become silence.
Source: Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Composition VIII — 1923
In Composition VIII, Kandinsky organises circles, lines, angles and geometric forms like the elements of a musical score.
The geometry is never cold. Some lines accelerate the gaze, while others hold it back. The circles seem to float, approach or recede. The spaces between forms become as important as the forms themselves.
The work has a highly precise architecture, yet retains a sense of movement and instability. It shows that balance does not necessarily arise from symmetry: it can emerge at the very heart of tension.
Source: Guggenheim Bilbao.
Yellow-Red-Blue — 1925
On the left, the forms are luminous and geometric. On the right, they become darker, denser and almost organic. Between them, Kandinsky constructs a balance that remains alive because it does not erase opposition.
Here colour is not an embellishment added to the composition. It forms its structure and directs the gaze. Yellow, red and blue do not decorate the space: they give it rhythm, depth and tension.
Source: Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Why Kandinsky accompanies me
Kandinsky does not inspire me because I wish to paint like him. He accompanies me because he took seriously the relationship between form, colour, rhythm and inner life.
In my work, colour remains restrained. It appears when it becomes necessary, never simply to embellish the surface. White, reliefs, cubes, traces and intervals construct their own breath. As in music, restraint can sometimes carry more presence than accumulation.
What I find in Kandinsky is this search for inner necessity: the desire not to add a form or colour merely because it seduces, but because it contributes to the work’s deeper balance.
An influence has value only when it does not confine us within another person’s language. It must help us hear our own more clearly.
Marie Dernoncourt, 2026