"publication : Wassily Kandinsky, Hilla Rebay, On the spiritual in art: First complete English translation"

“First I will make different color tests: I will study the dark – deep blue, deep violet, deep dirty green, etc. Often I see the colors before my eyes. Sometimes I imitate with my lips the deep sounds of the trumpet – then I see various deep mixtures which the word is uncapable od conceiving and which the palette can only feebly reproduce.”

“In many ways art is similar to religion. Its development consists not in new discoveries which invalidate the old truths . Its development consists in sudden illuminations, similar to lightning, in explosions, which burst in the sky like fireworks.. ..this illumination shows with blinding light new perspectives, new truths, which are basically nothing but the organic development, the further organic growth of the earlier wisdom.. .Was the New Testament possible without the Old? Could our time, that of the threshold of the 'third' revelation, be thinkable without the second?”

“Since the form is only an expression of the content and the content is different with different artists, it is then clear that there can be many different forms at the same time which are equally good. Necessity creates the form. Fish which live at great depths have no eyes. The elephant has a trunk. The chameleon changes its color, and so forth.”

“Content is nothing but the sum of organized tensions. From this point of view one can discover the basic identity of the rules of composition in all arts – always accepting that the arts can only represent their object materially by means of organised reactions.. ..already today one can safely assume that the roots of laws of composition are the same for art as they are for nature.”

“music leads us into a realm where musical experience is a matter not of the ear but of the soul alone, and at this point the music of the future begins.”

“I was unable to invent forms, and the sights of such forms always disgusts me. All the forms I ever used came of their own accord, they presented themselves to me already shaped, all I had to do was coy them, or else they took shape while I worked, often surprising me.. .I have trained myself not simply to let myself go, but to put reins on the power that works within me, and to guide it.”