The Artist Who Tried to Paint Music

A physicist split the atom, and a lawyer walked out to become a painter — and here is the exact method for reading the abstract art he invented. Follow the five shocks that turned a scientist into a painter: a colour-blazing northern village, Monet's Haystacks, a Rembrandt, Wagner's Lohengrin, and the split atom of 1896. Watch him erase the subject to paint the first abstract picture in history, learn why his Composition VI and Composition VII turn the end of the world into joy, and see how his "soul is a piano" colour theory still runs through Rothko, Pollock, and the Bauhaus chair. You will leave able to stand in front of a canvas everyone calls chaos and actually read it — ask what you feel, then ask how he did it. Lecture 12 of the series «An Art Historian's Lectures». 00:00 The man who walked out 04:03 Inside the painting 08:05 Color, and time 11:57 Learning to paint at thirty 15:38 Knights, towers, firebirds 20:01 The subject was in the way 25:17 The soul is a piano 30:04 Music you can see 35:47 How to look at a storm 41:07 The years of loss 45:06 Point, line, and the microscope 51:31 Exile and the last room 56:41 The man who taught us to feel Reproductions shown are in the public domain or CC0, via Wikimedia Commons: Kandinsky's Composition VI, VII and VIII, Improvisation 30 (Cannons), Improvisation 35, Picture with a Red Spot, On White II, Yellow-Red-Blue, Several Circles, Courbe dominante, Sky Blue, Railway at Murnau and the Blue Rider almanac cover; Claude Monet's Haystacks (Snow Effect); Kazimir Malevich's Black Square; and Richard Gerstl's portrait of Arnold Schoenberg (1906). Subscribe if this is your kind of thing.