Wassily Kandinsky could hear colors. When he looked at yellow he heard a high trumpet note; blue produced the sound of a cello; green was the middle register of a violin. This was not metaphor. Kandinsky had synesthesia, a neurological condition in which sensory experiences cross over between modalities, and he understood this condition as the key to his artistic practice. His ambition was to make paintings that worked the way music works: not by depicting the visible world but by using color, form, and rhythm to produce direct emotional responses in the viewer, bypassing conscious interpretation the way a musical phrase bypasses verbal description.
Kandinsky's synesthetic vision was unusual, but the desire to bring painting and music into dialogue is ancient. The two arts have been compared, borrowed from each other, and tried to solve each other's problems throughout Western history. This guide traces that conversation from its theoretical origins through its most productive 20th-century developments to its contemporary forms.
The Ancient Theory: Sight and Sound as Parallel Senses
The comparison between color and musical pitch goes back to ancient Greece, where Aristotle proposed that colors stand in the same proportional relationships to each other as musical intervals. The idea gained renewed currency in the 17th century, when Isaac Newton's discovery that white light contains all spectral colors prompted theorists to map the color spectrum onto the musical scale. The Jesuit mathematician Louis Bertrand Castel built a "color organ" in the 1730s that would display colored lights as keys were pressed, creating visible music that could be watched as well as heard.
None of these early theories produced lasting artistic results, but they established a framework of thought that painters and composers would return to repeatedly: the idea that the two senses might share underlying principles of harmony, proportion, and emotional effect that a sufficiently sophisticated artist could translate from one medium to the other.
Romanticism: Music as the Model Art
In the Romantic period, music achieved a cultural prestige that the other arts had not previously granted it. The Romantics argued that music, because it was the most abstract of the arts, the least tied to representation of the external world, was therefore the purest form of emotional expression. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called music "the direct copy of the will itself," by which he meant the deepest level of felt experience. Friedrich Schlegel wrote that "all art should aspire to the condition of music."
Painters responded. James McNeill Whistler, from the 1860s onward, began titling his paintings with musical terms: "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket" (c.1872), "Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1" (1871, popularly known as Whistler's Mother). The musical titles announced that his paintings should be appreciated as arrangements of color and tone rather than as representations of specific subjects. He was doing in paint what Romantic composers were doing in sound: pursuing pure aesthetic experience freed from narrative and moral content.
Kandinsky: Painting as Composition
Wassily Kandinsky was the painter who brought the aspiration for visual music into realized practice. His theoretical text "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" (1911), which you can explore further in the spotlight on Wassily Kandinsky: Abstraction, Music, and the Language of Color, argued for a systematic theory of the emotional effects of specific colors and forms, analogous to a composer's theory of the emotional effects of specific keys, intervals, and rhythms.
Kandinsky's paintings from the 1910s onward are titled "Compositions," "Improvisations," and "Impressions," terms borrowed directly from music. His friendship with the composer Arnold Schoenberg, who was simultaneously developing atonality in music and making his own expressionist paintings, reinforced his conviction that the two arts were parallel explorations of the same territory. When Schoenberg abandoned the tonal hierarchy that had organized Western music for centuries, Kandinsky was simultaneously abandoning representation. Both were pursuing the same liberation from established conventions toward purer expressive means.
Wassily Kandinsky, "Composition VII" (1913), oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Kandinsky's largest and most complex pre-war painting was carefully planned through more than 30 preparatory studies, like a musical score being developed before performance. Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Paul Klee: Drawing as Musical Notation
Paul Klee, Kandinsky's colleague at the Bauhaus, approached the relationship between visual art and music from a different angle. A professional violinist who played Bach daily throughout his life, Klee developed a drawing practice he understood as analogous to musical composition: the drawn line moved through time on the surface of the paper the way a melodic line moved through time in musical performance. His "Taking a Line for a Walk" (a phrase attributed to him) described the practice of following a drawn line through a composition without predetermined destination, the way improvisation follows a musical phrase.
Klee's theoretical text "Pedagogical Sketchbook" (1925), written for his Bauhaus students, analyzes visual rhythm, movement, and proportion using explicitly musical concepts. His paintings often use horizontal registers and repeating motifs that create an experience of serial pattern analogous to musical sequence or canon. Works like "Ad Parnassum" (1932) organize colored mosaic-like marks into a structured whole that invites the eye to move through the surface the way a listener moves through a musical form.
Abstract Expressionism: Painting as Performance
The Abstract Expressionists, particularly the "action painters," developed a practice in which the physical act of painting was the primary subject of the work, in a way that drew direct comparisons to musical performance. Jackson Pollock's drip paintings were made in a continuous physical performance across the horizontal canvas, his body moving through space, controlling the flow of paint with gesture and momentum. The painter Harold Rosenberg coined the term "action painting" to describe this approach, arguing that the canvas had become "an arena in which to act" rather than a surface on which to represent.
The parallel between Pollock's drip paintings and jazz improvisation was noted immediately. Both involve a performer making irrevocable marks in real time, guided by internalized musical or visual logic, responding to what has just been made as the basis for the next move. Pollock listened to jazz while working. The "gesture" of the brushstroke or paint drop corresponded, in his practice, to the "gesture" of the improvised phrase. The guide to Abstract Expressionism explores this period in full.
John Cage and Chance: Music as Visual Score
The composer John Cage, whose influence on 20th-century art extends far beyond music, brought the conversation between music and visual art into explicitly shared territory. His "4'33"" (1952), in which a performer sits at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds without playing, argued that all sounds, including ambient noise and the sounds of the audience, were music. This position was directly parallel to Marcel Duchamp's argument that any object designated as art was art, regardless of its physical properties.
Cage also developed graphical scores for several of his compositions: visual documents that looked more like abstract drawings or paintings than conventional musical notation. These were not readable by musicians trained in standard notation; they required a new kind of visual interpretation. The boundary between musical score and visual artwork became genuinely uncertain. Cage collaborated directly with the painter Robert Rauschenberg and was part of the same intellectual community as Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham that defined American avant-garde practice in the 1950s and 1960s.
Gerhard Richter: Painting Silence
The contemporary German painter Gerhard Richter directly engaged with John Cage through his series "4900 Colors" (2007) and his related "Cage Paintings" (2006), large-scale abstract works whose layered, scraped color surfaces were produced using a squeegee dragged across layers of wet paint. Richter described the process as analogous to Cage's use of chance operations: the squeegee's movement removes and redistributes paint in ways that exceed the painter's control, producing results that are partly intentional and partly accidental. The title "Cage Paintings" acknowledges the conceptual debt directly.
Richter is also a composer's choice of subject for visual representation. His 1971 photo-painting "Motorboat (First Version)" depicts a speedboat in motion in a way that captures the Romantic aspiration for a painting that conveys kinetic energy. His "October 18, 1977" cycle of blurred photo-paintings of the Baader-Meinhof Group was directly inspired by the German composer Luigi Nono's memorial compositions for the same event.
Contemporary Sound Art and Visual Music
Contemporary practice has produced a field of "sound art" that treats sound as a sculptural and spatial medium, creating environments in which sound and image are experienced together. Laurie Anderson's multi-media performances, Janet Cardiff's audio walks and speaker installations, Susan Philipsz's public sound installations, and Ryoji Ikeda's data-driven audiovisual environments all operate in territory that neither pure music nor pure visual art can describe. These works require both the visual and the sonic sense simultaneously, each modifying the experience of the other.
The question Kandinsky asked in 1911, whether painting could achieve the directness of emotional communication that music achieves, remains open. What has changed is the technical means available for pursuing it, and the willingness of artists in both fields to work in the space between. For the color theory background to these conversations, see Color Theory for Art Appreciation. Which musician or composer do you think has the most visual art sensibility? Share in the comments.
