Notes on Color - Kandinsky 1
First lifting from Wassily Kandinsky’s “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”
Competition arises. The wild battle for success becomes more and more material. (8)
…color can exercise enormous influence over the body as a physical organism. (25)
Colour cannot stand alone; it cannot dispense with boundaries of some kind. (28)
There is no “must” in art, because art is free. (32)
All means are sacred which are called for by the inner need. All means are sinful which obscure that inner need. (35)
Generally speaking, warmth or cold in a colour means an approach respectively to yellow or to blue. (36)
The blue… moves in upon itself, like a snail retreating into itself, and draws away from the spectator. (37)
An attempt to make yellow colder produces a green tint and checks both the horizontal and the eccentric movement. The colour becomes sickly and unreal. (37)
It is worth noting that the sour-tasting lemon and shrill-singing canary are both yellow. (37 - footnote)
Yellow is the typically earthy colour. It can never have profound meaning… It may be paralleled in human nature, with madness, not with melancholy or with hypochondriacal mania, but rather with violent raving lunacy. (38)
Blue is the typically heavenly colour… When it sinks almost to black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human. (38)
Green is the most restful colour that exists. On exhausted men this restfulness has a beneficial effect, but after a time it becomes wearisome. (38)
In the hierarchy of colours green is the “bourgeoisie” —self-satisfied, immovable, narrow. It is the colour of summer, the period when nature is resting from the storms of winter and the productive energy of spring. (38)
More particularly speaking, white, although often considered as no colour (a theory of the Impressionists, who saw no white in nature), is a symbol of a world from which all colour as a definite attribute has disappeared. (39)
White has the appeal of the nothingness that is before birth, of the world in the ice age. (39)
Outwardly black is the colour with the least harmony of all, a kind of neutral background against which the minutest colours stand clearly forward. It differs from white in this also, for with white nearly every colour is in discord, or even mute altogether. (39)
