The Painting That Broke All the Rules
47-year-old Russian artist stands before a massive canvas in Munich, Germany, chanting a single German word like a mantra: “Überflut… Überflut… Überflut” (Deluge).
For six months, he’s been trapped, unable to complete what he knows will be his most important work. Then, in just three days of frenzied painting, he creates what art historians now call the pinnacle of early abstract art…
Composition VII
This swirling hurricane of colour and form is considered by abstract art enthusiasts to be the most important painting of its kind and Kandinsky’s most famous work. But what makes this chaotic explosion of shapes and colours so revolutionary? And what hidden meanings lie beneath its vibrant surface?
The Gift That Changed Everything: Synesthesia
To understand Composition VII, you first need to understand Wassily Kandinsky’s brain worked differently than yours or mine. Synesthesia, a rare neurological condition in which two senses become cross-wired, may have inspired Kandinsky to pursue art-making.
Kandinsky could literally hear colours and see sounds. When he mixed colours on his palette as a child, he heard a strange hissing noise. When he attended Wagner’s opera Lohengrin at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, he didn’t just hear the music, he saw it explode in wild, colourful visions before his eyes. This singular experience made him abandon a promising law career at age 30 to become an artist.
Experts believe Kandinsky associated yellow with the trumpet, red with the violin, and blue with the organ. His paintings weren’t just visual art, they were attempts to paint music itself, to make you see the sounds he experienced every day.
Symbolism of Composition VII
When you first encounter Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition VII, your eyes search desperately for something recognisable.
A face, a tree, a horizon line. But there’s nothing. Just an overwhelming explosion of colours, lines, and shapes that seem to collide and swirl across a massive canvas. Yet this apparent chaos contains one of the most complex symbolic systems ever created in abstract art.
Art historians have concluded that the work is a combination of the themes of Resurrection, Judgment Day, the Flood and the Garden of Eden. But how does Kandinsky communicate these profound biblical themes without painting a single recognisable figure? The answer lies in understanding his revolutionary approach to symbolism in abstract art.
Biblical Symbolism: Four Apocalyptic Themes
Kandinsky didn’t create random abstraction. His inspiration for Composition VII was the Apocalypse, highly relevant to his experiences living in pre-WWI Germany. The painting weaves together four interconnected biblical narratives into one unified symbolic composition:
The Flood (Noah’s Ark)
According to Kandinsky, the painting represents “the Flood,” meaning the biblical story of Noah, attempting to distill the emotional, psychological, and spiritual essences of the story, destruction and creation; fear and hope. Look for the boat symbolism hidden throughout the canvas.
Images found within the work include a boat with two oars in the center and slightly to the right, and a figure in a triangular-shaped boat in the upper left corner, perhaps clutching a sword, all which correspond symbolically with the Old Testament theme of the Apocalypse. These boats represent humanity’s journey through catastrophe toward salvation.
The Last Judgment
The chaotic energy of the painting symbolises the moment of divine reckoning. The swirling vortex at the center suggests souls being sorted, the cosmic upheaval of judgment day where nothing remains stable or certain.
Resurrection
Within the chaos, there are forms that suggest rising, ascending movement, symbolising rebirth and spiritual transcendence. Kandinsky believed destruction and creation were inseparable, and the painting captures both simultaneously.
Paradise/Garden of Eden
The vibrant colours, particularly the blues, yellows, and reds, symbolise the promise of paradise beyond destruction. The painting doesn’t show paradise literally but evokes its spiritual essence through colour harmonies.
Color Symbolism in Composition VII
Kandinsky developed an entire symbolic language of colour, where each hue carried specific spiritual and emotional meanings:
Blue Symbolism: Represents spiritual aspiration, calmness, and the divine. The deep blues throughout suggest heaven and transcendence.
Yellow Symbolism: Conveys earthly energy, warmth, and sometimes spiritual disturbance. Yellow represents the material world being shaken.
Red Symbolism: Symbolises passion, blood, violence, and transformation. The reds suggest both destruction and the life force itself.
White Symbolism: Represents purity, silence, and infinite possibility, the blank canvas from which creation emerges.
Black Symbolism: Symbolises death, endings, and the void, but also the necessary darkness before rebirth.
The way these colours collide and blend creates what Kandinsky called emotional “chords” combinations that produce specific spiritual effects, just like musical chords create emotional responses.
The Symbolism of Musical Structure
Kandinsky titled his most important works “Compositions” deliberately, borrowing terminology from music to indicate these paintings functioned as visual symphonies with complex symbolic structures.
Kandinsky believed that paintings could evoke sounds, just as much as music evoked images, and that both were a way of conveying emotion.
The painting’s structure mirrors a musical composition with:
Crescendos: Areas of intense colour and energy symbolising climactic moments
Harmonies: Colour combinations that work together to create unified meaning
Rhythms: Repeated forms and patterns that create visual tempo
Themes: Recurring shapes and motifs that develop throughout the composition
Theosophical Symbolism
Kandinsky was deeply influenced by Theosophy, a spiritual movement that believed certain shapes, colours, and forms could express universal spiritual truths. In Composition VII, he embedded theosophical symbols that operated on multiple levels simultaneously.
The overall composition symbolises humanity’s spiritual evolution from material existence, represented by earthly colours and chaos, toward divine consciousness, represented by areas of harmony and transcendent blues. Kandinsky believed society formed a spiritual pyramid with enlightened artists at the apex, and Composition VII symbolises this hierarchy through its triangular compositional elements.
Most profoundly, Kandinsky believed that form itself, even if completely abstract, has its own inner sound, every shape and colour in Composition VII was chosen to produce specific spiritual vibrations in the viewer’s soul.
“Kandinsky, who was one of the founders of modern art, sets out to confront the crass materialism of his era. In this, he stands in the tradition of Russian art that sees “Art as service” – and specifically, as service of that which has the sacred at its core.”
