Impression III (Concert)

On the second of January, 1911, Kandinsky sat in a Munich concert hall listening to the new, unsettling music of Arnold Schoenberg, where the old rules about harmony had been thrown out. He painted this within days. The black wedge filling the left is a grand piano, and the crowd of the audience presses toward it along the bottom, while a great sheet of yellow floods the rest, Kandinsky's color for sound itself. He was not trying to picture the room. He was after the feeling of hearing music come loose from its old rules, the same thing he wanted to do with painting. He was moved enough to write to Schoenberg afterward, and the two struck up a friendship.