Ohne Titel 1915

Wassily Kandinsky made this beautiful watercolour painting without a title, full of gentle marks and translucent colour. Kandinsky was a bit of a synesthete, and believed that colour could express the same kind of emotion as music. The way he’s applied the paint here, thinly washed in places, with just a few darker accents, makes it feel like a musical score, or a diagram. The way the lines are loose and free – it’s as if he’s thinking out loud on paper. See how the blues, reds, and yellows float and overlap, creating a sense of depth and movement. There’s a concentrated cluster in the middle and all these other marks floating around it. It's like he’s inventing a new alphabet or a new language. Thinking about someone like Paul Klee, who was a contemporary of Kandinsky, they are both trying to use abstraction as a way to create something new. It's like they are both trying to make a new kind of visual poetry.