Kadinsky was right: art doesn’t erase the old model

“It should not be forgotten that art is not a science where the latest ‘correct’ theory declares the old to be false and erases it.”
— Wassily Kandinsky

A lawyer before he made the later-in-life decision to paint, Wassily Kadinsky likely had synesthesia — that is, he experienced colours as sounds and vice versa. He began painting in Russia in the 19th century; his work, which evolved continuously, still seems so contemporary all these decades later.

Kadinsky’s life took a lot of turns. He fled Russia after the Revolution, ran around with the Bauhaus movement in Germany in the 1920s, and eventually became a French citizen before his death in 1944.

I had not really paid much attention to his work until a visit to the Guggenheim museum in New York some years ago. It was electrifying to see how vivid these abstractions are. The piece above, Composition 8, is in the Guggenheim collection.

The quote above can be found in works like this.