From October 15, 2025, to February 1, 2026, the Philharmonie de Paris will dedicate a major exhibition to Wassily Kandinsky, exploring the deep bond the Russian artist cultivated with musical language. The show, titled Kandinsky et la musique, investigates how synesthesia and the parallels between sound and color influenced the birth of abstract art, making music a central key in the painter’s creative journey. Paintings, watercolors, prints, and archival documents will be presented alongside scores, instruments, and sound installations, in a layout that merges visual arts and acoustic dimension. Fascinated by the immaterial power of music, Kandinsky wrote in his theoretical texts that a work of art should touch the soul like a musical composition, freed from figurative representation. The exhibition highlights the crucial role of composer Arnold Schoenberg, with whom Kandinsky maintained a correspondence and creative exchange, sharing the idea of breaking traditional rules to open up new expressive possibilities. Alongside masterpieces on loan from international museums such as the Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim, the exhibition will feature immersive rooms where visitors can perceive correspondences between painting and sound, between lines and rhythm, between colors and harmonies. It is not merely about illustrating an influence but about recreating the multisensory dimension Kandinsky conceived as the foundation of his artistic quest. At the heart of Paris, the Philharmonie thus invites us to rediscover Kandinsky as an artist who translated musical experience into vision, laying the groundwork for a new twentieth-century aesthetic.
