The Painter's Keys Community For Artists
The Painter's Keys, a book by Robert Genn

Search the Painter's Keys:

Search for an author:

Kandinsky Art Quotes - (47 quotes)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Abstraction category:

The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct its appeal. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Abstraction category:

Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for color, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Art category:

The arts are encroaching one upon another, and from a proper use of this encroachment will rise the art that is truly monumental. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Artists category:

I value those artists who embody the expression of their life. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Beauty category:

That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Beginning category:

An empty canvas, apparently really empty, that says nothing and is without significance – almost dull, in fact – in reality, is crammed with thousands of undertone tensions and full of expectancy. Slightly apprehensive lest it should be outraged. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Colour category:

I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife, and I made them sing with all the intensity I could... (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Colour category:

Almost without exception, blue refers to the domain of abstraction and immateriality. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Colour category:

Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Colour category:

A parallel between color and music can only be relative – just as a violin can give warm shades of tone, so yellow has shades, which can be expressed by various instruments. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Colour category:

The sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble... (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Colour category:

As a picture painted in yellow always radiates spiritual warmth, or as one in blue has apparently a cooling effect, so green is only boring. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Colour category:

In the hierarchy of colors, green represents the social middle class, self-satisfied, immovable, narrow... (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Colour category:

Absolute green is the most restful color, lacking any undertone of joy, grief, or passion. On exhausted men this restfulness has a beneficial effect, but after a time it becomes tedious. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Colour category:

Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Colour category:

Colors produce a corresponding spiritual vibration, and it is only as a step towards this spiritual vibration that the elementary physical impression is of importance. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Composition category:

The composition is the organized sum of the interior functions of every part of the work. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Construction category:

The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these "walls around art." (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Creativity category:

The true work of art is born from the Artist: a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Doubt category:

Doubts must be resolved alone within the soul. Otherwise one would profane one's own powerful solution. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Experience category:

When I was thirteen or fourteen I bought a paintbox with oil paints from money slowly saved up. The feeling I had at the time – or better – the experience of color coming slowly out of the tube – is with me to this day. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Fear category:

The more frightening the world becomes... the more art becomes abstract. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Form category:

The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Freedom category:

There is no must in art because art is free. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Impressionism category:

-on viewing one of Monet's paintings...
Painting took on a fabulous strength and splendor; the object was discredited as an indispensable element of the picture. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Journey category:

There is only one road to follow, that of analysis of the basic elements in order to arrive ultimately at an adequate graphic expression. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Lines category:

Everything starts from a dot. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Masters category:

In their pursuit of the same supreme end, Matisse and Picasso stand side by side, Matisse representing color and Picasso form. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Methodology category:

All methods are sacred if they are internally necessary. All methods are sins if they are not justified by internal necessity. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Oils category:

When I was thirteen or fourteen I bought a paintbox with oil paints from money slowly saved up. The feeling I had at the time – or better – the experience of color coming slowly out of the tube – is with me to this day. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Painting category:

In every painting a whole is mysteriously enclosed, a whole life of tortures, doubts, of hours of enthusiasm and inspiration. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Power category:

The impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle produces an effect no less powerful than the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Prayer category:

The word compositon moved me spiritually and I made it my aim in life to paint a composition. It affected me like a prayer and filled me with awe. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Purpose category:

Only just now awakening after years of materialism, our soul is still infected with the despair born of unbelief, of lack of purpose and aim. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Purpose category:

In place of an intensive cooperation among artists, there is a battle for goods. Hatred, partisanship, cliques, jealousy, and intrigues are the natural consequences of an aimless, materialist art. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Reality category:

Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Revelation category:

Everything shows me its face, its innermost being, its secret soul, which is more often silent than heard. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Revelation category:

Today is the great day of one of the revelations of this world. The interrelationships of these individual realms were illumined as by a flash of lightning; they burst unexpected, frightening, and joyous out of the darkness. Never were they so strongly tied together and never so sharply divided... (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Sight category:

It is essential that the painter should develop not only his eyes, but also his soul, so that it too may be capable of weighing colors in balance... (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Spirituality category:

Every man who steeps himself in the spiritual possibilities of his heart is a valuable helper in the building of the spiritual pyramid which will someday reach to heaven. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Subject category:

I really believe that I am the first and only artist to throw not just the 'subject' out of my paintings, but every 'object' as well. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Suffering category:

The artist is not a 'Sunday child' for whom everything immediately succeeds. He does not have the right to live without duty. The task that is assigned to him is painful, it is a heavy cross for him to bear. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Theory category:

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)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Timeliness category:

Every work of art is the child of its time; each period produces an art of its own, which cannot be repeated. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Tradition category:

Efforts to revive the art principles of the past at best produce works of art that resemble a stillborn child. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Tradition category:

The artist must be blind to distinctions between 'recognized' and 'unrecognized' conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age. He must watch only the trend of the inner need, and hearken to its words alone. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Wassily Kandinsky - From the Wonder category:

An empty canvas is a living wonder... far lovelier than certain pictures. (Wassily Kandinsky)

Editor: Robert Genn

Consultants: Sara Genn, Richard Thompson
Technical Support and Presentation: Andrew Niculescu

Associate Editors:
Scott Altman, Bonnie Austin, Karen Austin, Michele Becker, Joe Blodgett, Norman Brown, Alyce Bryson, Leanne Cadden, Penny Duane, Max Elliot, Derek Franklin, Mardy Grothe, Harry Hartley, Sue Holland, Shawn Jackson, Sue Legault, Tammy McManus, Eric Mewhinney, Bruce Miller, Laura Parrish, Andrea Pratt, Dan Roberts, Shirley Rochon, Gilbert Roy, John Sherlock, Victor Wong,

And many others who have so far contributed one or a few. Please join us and add more at