Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular

"Although this one is not specifically about synaesthesia, Kandinsky, in some of his writings, did indicate that he was a synaesthete. There has been some debate about that. He, famously, is supposed to have heard a hiss coming from his paintbox which I guess was referring to the sound of the colours. There are two parts to this pamphlet. The second part is probably the most relevant. This is the part that’s called “About Painting.” It really gets into the psychology of colour. He claims that each colour, in terms of the painter’s palette, has two ‘meanings’. The first is the effects on the eye and the second the inner resonance. He was trying to reach a universal translation of colour. He does admit in the pamphlet that it’s not based on science, but on feeling and mysticism. I see it as an attempt to intellectualise synaesthesia. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There are a good few pages of analysis in terms of specific colours and how they resonate on the soul. I think he calls it their “psychic effect.” Either by themselves or when acting with other colours, they create these visual chords. I know it sounds fanciful or flowery to some people, but I found that really interesting. Not least because I disagree with the meanings of some of the colours that he talks about. You see this a lot with synaesthetes. He talks about different kinds of colours – for example, sour tasting lemon and shrill singing canary. He sees yellow corresponding in humans to “violent, raving lunacy”, which I just find fascinating. To me, yellow, especially pale yellow, is the colour of curiosity. To go back to what we were saying earlier about the point of art, in the first part of the pamphlet there is this call to arms for artists to express themselves, their inner selves and not just rely on the material world around them. This obviously led to his commitment to abstract painting."