On white (I). Composition No. 224
1920
- Period Early 20th century
- CategoryAbstraction
- Share
In the early 1920s, Wassily Kandinsky painted a series of canvases dominated by the colour white. The artist himself wrote that white «is a symbol of a world from which all colour as a definite attribute has disappeared. This world is too far above us for its harmony to touch our souls. A great silence, like an impenetrable wall, shrouds its life from our understanding. White, therefore, has this harmony of silence, which works upon us negatively, like many pauses in music that break temporarily the melody. It is not a dead silence, but one pregnant with possibilities. White has the appeal of the nothingness that is before birth, of the world in the ice age.» Russian Museum: From Icons to the Modern Times. Palace Editions, St Petersburg, 2015. P. 320.