He was inspired to give up his law career in part by a production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Bolshoi Theater. Kandinsky believed that art was closely connected to music.

Kandinsky, who had just turned 30, decided instead to focus on painting. He was then offered a position as a professor of law at the University of Dorpat in Tartu (in present-day Estonia). He graduated in 1893 and taught law at the university for three years. In one, he says: “Some artists have a nervous hand at drawing, which gives their technique something of the sound peculiar to a violin.Before devoting himself completely to art, Kandinsky complied with his parents’ wishes and studied law at Moscow State University. This is suggested in various letters that he wrote to his brother Theo. Many art historians believe that Vincent van Gogh also had chromesthesia. Kandinsky literally saw colours when he heard music, and heard music when he painted – a specific form of synesthesia called chromesthesia, where a person experiences sound as colour.

People with synesthesia can be triggered to smell something when they hear a sound, or to see a shape when they eat a certain food.

It’s a rare but real condition in which one sense, like hearing, concurrently triggers another sense, such as sight. The neurological phenomenon he experienced is called synesthesia (or “joined perception”, from the Greek word syn meaning “together” and aisthesis meaning “perception”). Kandinsky associated each note with an exact hue. For the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), music and colour were inextricably tied into one another.

Kandinsky lab music