40 pages • 1 hour read
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
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BetaPart 2, Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “About Painting”
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “The Psychological Working of Color”
When most people experience color, it makes only a “momentary and superficial impression” (24) consisting of physical sensations, such as those suggestive of warmth and coolness. In more “sensitive” souls, by contrast, colors have a deeper, more intense, psychic effect resulting in a “spiritual vibration.” In some people, colors can even suggest the effects of other senses, like taste or touch or sound.
Kandinsky states the first of several “guiding principles”: Color is “a power which directly influences the soul” and that the artist is “the hand” which plays with color like a musician on his instrument “to cause vibrations in the soul” (25). Thus, “color harmony” is one of the “guiding principles” of Kandinsky’s theory of art, based on the concept of the “inner need.”
Part 2, Chapter 5 Analysis
In this chapter, Kandinsky introduces the subject of colors and their psychological and emotional effects on the soul, a subject he will discuss at much greater length in the following chapter. Upon seeing color, the eye at first receives “a purely physical impression” (23), but although this first impression is merely “superficial,” it later deepens into other sensations that more directly involve the soul and emotions. Kandinsky terms this the “psychic effect” of the colors and associates it with a “spiritual vibration.” As he does frequently, Kandinsky emphasizes The Affinity of Visual Art and Music: The artist’s job is to create spiritual vibrations, by means of color, in the souls of viewers, much as a musician plays the strings of an instrument.
The emotional associations of various colors are rooted partly in our experience of physical objects and phenomena. By seeing a particular color, we may be reminded of how an object of that color affected our senses. For example, we may be reminded of the warmth of a flame by seeing the color red. Here, Kandinsky hints at the theme of synesthesia by citing examples of people who have claimed to be able to “hear” or “taste” colors. Kandinsky claims that “keen lemon-yellow hurts the eye as a prolonged and shrill trumpet-note the ear” (24), hinting at his own experience of synesthesia.
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