See sounds and hear colors: the Center Pompidou is launching an unprecedented virtual experience to simultaneously experience in color, music and emotional sensation what Vassily Kandinsky, a great painter and inventor of lyrical abstraction, expressed.

This innovative experience, the visitor will be able to live it from Wednesday by simple clicks on his smartphone via a platform dedicated to the painter.

Kandinsky (1866-1944) gave the sound / image association the learned name of "synesthesia".

He saw the possibility of accessing a sixth artistic sense.

The painter of Russian origin, died in France in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine), who theorized his creation in his famous treatise "Du spirituel dans l'art", associated with each color / form a sound , claiming to want to make visual as well as musical scores.

It was for him to "see the music and hear the color", according to the Center Pompidou.

Dissonance

The iconic canvas of the museum "Yellow, red, blue" from 1925 was chosen as the site of this experiment.

The user is invited to click on small triangles scattered on the table.

For example a yellow triangle: then resonate trumpet sounds "evoking passion, sweet madness".

A blue triangle triggers a deep organ sound, "evoking peace, a heavenly emotion," explains Commissioner Angela Lampe.

Short sentences taken from the painter's reflections, explaining what these shapes and colors aroused in him as feelings, emotions, are displayed each time.

By clicking on several triangles at the same time, one will end up with "the cacophony, moment when one awaits the conductor just before a concert. However Kandinsky was a great defender of the dissonance, he wanted to dissociate each voice, each sound. ", underlines Angela Lampe.   

With the project manager Pierre Caessa from Google Arts & Culture, they created a multidimensional site, the result of two years of work, which aims to allow visitors to understand the artist and his abstraction from within.

It thus provides access to the 3,000 items, most of which are photos, from the Kandinsky Fund of the Center Pompidou, the largest in the world.

You can take a journey through your life, from Moscow to Paris.

With AFP

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