« Better living through neurochemistry? | Main | The science of empathy »

June 19, 2006

Kandinsky's roaring colours:

KadinskyCompositionVII.jpgThe Telegraph has an article on an upcoming exhibition at London's Tate Modern gallery that shows how Kandinsky used his synaesthesia to create the world's first truly abstract paintings.

Kandinsky discovered his synaesthesia at a performance of Wagner's opera Lohengrin in Moscow: "I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me." In 1911, after studying and settling in Germany, he was similarly moved by a Schoenberg concert and finished painting Impression III (Konzert) two days later. The abstract artist and the atonal composer became friends, and Kandinsky even exhibited Schoenberg's paintings in the first Blue Rider exhibition in Munich in the same year.

The exhibition will run from June 22nd to October 1st and has a number of accompanying educational events.


Link to article 'The man who heard his paintbox hiss' (via 3Quarks).
Link to details of exhibition from Tate Modern.

—Vaughan.

Posted at June 19, 2006 02:30 PM

Comments

Sandy G says:


A Pioneer in synesthesia research is V S Ramachandran and most of his research papers are freely avaiable at the URL http://psy.ucsd.edu/chip/ramapubs.html

He has also written books like "Phantoms in the brain" and "The emerging mind". "The emerging mind" is a ompilation of Reith Lectures given by him 2-3 years back and the archived audio/transcripts should be avialbale on BBC4.

Comment posted at June 20, 2006 11:23 AM

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?