Michael: Alright Kevin, review this book in exactly five words. Kevin: Colors have feelings. Or… something? Michael: Close! Mine is: "Your soul is a piano." Kevin: Okay, now I'm both intrigued and deeply confused. That sounds like the title of a self-help book written by a ghost. Let's get into it. Michael: We are definitely getting into it. We’re talking about Wassily Kandinsky’s groundbreaking book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. And what’s wild is that Kandinsky wasn’t some lifelong, paint-splattered artist from birth. He was a successful lawyer and economist. Kevin: Wait, a lawyer? So he was professionally trained in arguing in black and white, and then he decides to write a book about the spiritual meaning of yellow and blue? Michael: Precisely. At age 30, he had what you could only call a spiritual epiphany. He saw one of Monet's Haystacks paintings and was so moved by the power of pure color that he dropped his entire career and enrolled in art school in Munich. This book, written in 1910, is basically his manifesto. He saw it as a spiritual antidote to what he felt was a rising tide of soulless materialism sweeping across Europe. Kevin: A spiritual antidote. That sounds… heavy. What exactly was art supposed to be fighting against? It feels like a lot to put on a painting.

Michael: It’s a huge weight, and that’s his whole point. At the time, the dominant idea was “art for art’s sake.” Art was becoming a decoration, a commodity, something “nice” or “splendid,” as he put it. Kandinsky found this horrifying. He believed art had a sacred duty, a profound social responsibility to nourish the human soul. Kevin: A duty? That’s a strong word. Most artists I know would say their only duty is to their own vision, not to society’s spiritual health. Michael: And Kandinsky would say that’s where they’re wrong! He visualizes the spiritual life of humanity as this enormous, sharp-angled triangle, moving almost imperceptibly forward and upward. Kevin: Okay, a spiritual triangle. I’m picturing a diagram in a PowerPoint presentation for a corporate retreat on mindfulness. Break this down for me. Michael: It’s a powerful image. The broad base of the triangle is where the majority of society is—stuck in materialism, asking what the practical use of anything is. As you move up, the sections get smaller and smaller. You have intellectuals, thinkers, and then, at the very, very top—the apex of the triangle—there is only one person. A lone, often tormented visionary. Kevin: And let me guess, the artist is that person at the top? Michael: The true artist, yes. And this is the crucial part: that person at the top, the visionary, is dragging the entire, heavy triangle up with them. They are misunderstood, often ridiculed. Kandinsky uses the perfect example: Beethoven. Kevin: Oh, I can see that. The guy shaking his fist at the heavens. Michael: Exactly. When Beethoven was composing his later works, his contemporaries were baffled. The composer Carl Maria von Weber famously said Beethoven was “ripe for an asylum.” Another critic, listening to the Seventh Symphony, complained about a repeating note, calling it a “miserable ‘e’” and saying Beethoven must be deaf to it. They saw madness. Kevin: Wow. And now that symphony is used in every epic movie trailer to signify triumph. Michael: That’s the triangle moving! Beethoven was at the apex, enduring the solitude and insults, but his inner vision was so powerful it literally pulled the rest of humanity’s spiritual understanding up to his level over the next century. For Kandinsky, this is the artist’s job. Not to create pretty pictures, but to be that lonely figure at the top, creating the spiritual food that will eventually nourish the segments below. Kevin: That’s a much more heroic vision of an artist than just someone trying to sell paintings in a gallery. But hold on, it also sounds a bit… elitist, doesn't it? Who gets to decide who is a true visionary pulling us all up, and who is just a charlatan making incomprehensible noise? Michael: That is the million-dollar question, and it’s a criticism that has been leveled against these ideas. Kandinsky’s answer is that it’s not about popular acclaim or critical consensus. It’s about the "inner need." The authenticity of the artist’s spiritual impulse. A charlatan is faking the feeling, creating something for external effect. The true visionary creates because they must. Their soul compels them to express a truth, even if no one else understands it yet. Kevin: The ‘inner need.’ It sounds like a gut feeling, but for the soul. So the proof isn't in the immediate reception, but in the long-term impact? Whether the triangle eventually moves? Michael: Precisely. It’s a long game. And this idea was deeply influenced by the spiritual movements of his time, like Theosophy, which was also talking about humanity’s spiritual evolution and the coming of a new age of enlightenment. Kandinsky was tapping into a widespread cultural anxiety that science and industry were killing our souls, and he was offering art as the only thing that could save us. Kevin: So the artist is a kind of prophet. That’s a lot of pressure. If that’s the ‘why’—to pull the spiritual triangle upward—what was the ‘how’? What’s the actual rope they use to pull this giant thing? Michael: That’s the perfect question, and it leads right to Kandinsky's most radical and famous idea. If the artist's job is to pull the triangle up, the rope isn't painting things you can recognize. It's painting feelings. He literally wanted to paint music.

Kevin: Paint music? Okay, my brain just short-circuited a little. I get it as a metaphor, but what does that actually mean in practice? You can’t hear a painting. Michael: Kandinsky would argue that you can, but with your soul. He believed that color and form, when detached from representing a physical object, could speak directly to our emotions, bypassing our rational minds entirely. He has this incredible metaphor that became the heart of the book. Kevin: Lay it on me. I’m ready for the soul piano. Michael: He says: "Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul." Kevin: Wow. That’s a beautiful image. So looking at a specific color is like hearing a specific note? It creates a direct emotional response, a ‘vibration.’ Michael: Exactly. And he gets incredibly specific about it. He describes colors like they have personalities. For example, he says yellow is an earthly, aggressive color. It’s cheeky and importunate, and if you stare at it too long, it’s unsettling. It’s the color of a trumpet blast. Kevin: Yellow is cheeky? My yellow post-it notes suddenly feel very judgmental. What about other colors? Michael: Blue is its opposite. Blue is the heavenly color. It’s peaceful, and it pulls you away from the viewer, into the infinite. It’s the sound of a flute or a cello. Green is the most restful color, but it’s passive and self-satisfied, like a fat cow lying in a field. It’s the calm, middle-range notes of a violin. Kevin: A fat cow? He really went there. This is fascinating, but I have to be the skeptic here. Isn't this all incredibly subjective? I might find green energizing. Someone else might find yellow calming. How can this be a universal language if everyone’s ‘soul piano’ is tuned differently? Michael: That’s the critical point Kandinsky makes. It’s not a simple, scientific formula where Yellow = Happy. The effect of any color depends entirely on its context, its form, and most importantly, the artist’s "inner need." He tells a story about an artist painting a sad picture. Logically, you’d use sad colors. But he says the most powerful choice might be to put a figure in a bright red cloak. Kevin: That seems counterintuitive. Red is usually associated with passion or anger, not sadness. Michael: Right, but in a gloomy composition, that flash of brilliant red creates a jarring discord. It’s a note that doesn’t fit, and that very clash can heighten the overall feeling of sorrow more powerfully than a sea of muted, sad colors would. The artist’s inner need—the desire to express profound sadness—guides the use of the color, not a rulebook. Kevin: Okay, that makes more sense. It’s about the harmony, or disharmony, of the whole piece. It’s not a dictionary; it’s a grammar. The artist combines the color-words to create a sentence that expresses a complex feeling. Michael: A perfect way to put it. And this is where he radically departed from his contemporaries, even other modernists like Picasso. It’s a key distinction the book’s translator makes. He points out that Picasso and the Cubists, who were inspired by Cézanne, were still fundamentally engaged with the material world. Kevin: How so? They were breaking things down into cubes and shapes. That seems pretty abstract. Michael: It is, but they were breaking down objects. A guitar, a face, a bowl of fruit. They were analyzing the structure of reality. Kandinsky, coming from the more spiritual tradition of Gauguin, wanted to abandon reality altogether. He wasn't interested in the teacup; he was interested in the feeling the teacup gave you. Cézanne famously said he could make a teacup feel as alive as a human being. Kandinsky wanted to take that feeling and paint it directly, without the teacup. Kevin: So Picasso was like a physicist smashing atoms to see what they’re made of, while Kandinsky was trying to capture the energy released in the explosion. Michael: That’s a fantastic analogy. And it’s why his work was, and still is, so challenging for many people. We are trained to look at a painting and ask, "What is it a picture of?" Kandinsky is asking us to stop looking and start listening. He believed he was creating a pure, abstract, visual music that could communicate across cultures and languages because it spoke to the soul, which he believed was universal. Kevin: It’s an incredibly ambitious project. To create a universal language of emotion. Did he think he succeeded? Michael: He believed he was laying the groundwork. He knew it was a new frontier. The book is full of a sense of discovery and urgency. He’s not presenting a finished theory, but a call to arms for other artists to join him in this exploration, to turn away from the material and toward the spiritual. He was convinced that this was the only path forward for art if it was to have any meaning in the modern world.

Kevin: When you put it all together, it’s a pretty profound vision. You have this grand, almost messianic mission for art—to elevate all of humanity on this Spiritual Triangle. And then you have this radical new toolkit—this language of color and form designed to play the soul like a piano. Michael: It completely reframes the purpose of art. Kandinsky is arguing that a work of art’s value isn’t in its beauty, its technical skill, or its realism. Its true value lies in its ability to communicate the incommunicable. He quotes the composer Schumann: "To send light into the darkness of men's hearts—such is the duty of the artist." That’s the whole book in one sentence. Kevin: It really makes you look at abstract art completely differently. You're not supposed to stand in front of a Rothko or a Pollock and ask, "What is it?" The question is, "What does it make me feel?" What vibration is it creating in me? Michael: Exactly. You have to approach it with a different sense. It’s a common experience for people to feel intimidated or even angered by abstract art, thinking it’s a joke they’re not in on. Kandinsky would say that’s because they’re using their intellect, their eyes. He wants you to use your soul, your ears. Kevin: It’s a huge shift in perspective. It’s active, not passive. The viewer has a job to do, too. You have to be open to letting the ‘soul piano’ be played. Michael: You do. And that’s our takeaway. This book, though over a century old, offers a powerful new way to engage with art. It’s a guide to listening with your eyes. So the next time you’re in a museum and you walk into a room of abstract paintings, maybe try an experiment. Kevin: I’m listening. Michael: Don't look for a story. Don't try to find a recognizable shape. Just stand there for a moment and listen. Listen for a sound. What song is the painting playing for you? Kevin: I love that. It turns a museum visit from an intellectual exercise into an emotional experience. We'd be curious to hear what you all think. Does art have a spiritual duty, or is 'art for art's sake' enough? Can a color really have a personality? Let us know your thoughts. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.