If you’ve ever tried to describe colors with words, chances are you struggled to find the exact terms to convey what your eyes perceive, and you end up resorting to metaphors. In the dictionary, red is described as resembling the color of blood. Blue gets compared to a clear sky. Green almost always finds itself aligned with grass and growing foliage.
But what if you could use other senses to draw parallels between colors and sounds? That’s the creative endeavour that Vassily Kandinsky set to pursue in some of his artworks. Thanks to his gift of synesthesia, an ability for multi-sensory perception, he was able to explore the relationship between sounds, colors and shapes, and to translate music to paintings.
The Centre Pompidou and Google Arts & Culture have partnered to pay tribute to the artist, who is considered an initiator of the abstract art movement. “Sounds like Kandinsky” brings together his most emblematic artworks, opens up some rare personal archives, and introduces a Machine Learning experiment that lets everyone “Play a Kandinsky”.
Though many people will be able to recognize some of Kandinsky’s most famous artworks, the man behind the canvas is less known. We have digitized 3,700 artworks, personal photographs, and documents with Google Arts & Culture’s tabletop scanner - such as childhood memories, pictures of holidays with Paul Klee, or Kandinksy’s studio in Neuilly - contributed by the Kandinsky collection bequeathed by Nina Kandinsky. This allows everyone to enter the universe of the artist's life and work.