Synaesthesia

Wassily Kandinsky, one of my favorite abstract artists, was said to have a condition known as synaesthesia...a condition that allows a person to appreciate sounds, colours or words with two or more senses simultaneously. In other words, colours and painted marks triggered particular sounds or musical notes and vice versa.

There is still debate whether Kandinsky was himself a natural synaesthete, or merely experimenting with this confusion of senses in combination with the colour theories of Goethe, Schopenhauer and Rudolf Steiner, in order to further his vision for a new abstract art.

Nevertheless, can you imagine the sounds he heard when he created these paintings?

"his swirling compositions were painted with polyphonic swathes of warm, high-pitched yellow that he might balance with a patch of cold, sonorous blue or a silent, black void."