Wassily Kandinsky – Composition VII

• Theme: Pure abstraction, inner necessity, visual music

• Visual: A massive, explosive field of swirling color and gestural lines; vague forms suggest resurrection, apocalypse, flood, and spiritual ascent—but nothing is defined; the painting operates like a symphony, with rhythms, climaxes, and interweaving themes of color and shape

Thinking Through Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)’s Philosophy on Art Essence

Nietzsche would walk before this work and feel not peace, but vibration. He would not try to decipher it. He would feel it. For Composition VII is not a message—it is an event, a force, a happening in pigment.

Kandinsky does not show us anything. He makes us feel everything. This is not a loss of form—it is freedom from form. Nietzsche would call it the moment art lets go of the world, and becomes world-creating itself.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche dreamed of art that would recapture the power of music—its ability to express the unrepresentable, to resonate with the unconscious, to affirm life without describing it. Kandinsky gives us that: color as melody, line as rhythm, canvas as stage for Becoming.

There is no narrative here. And yet, the composition evokes cosmic struggle, rebirth, the wild surge of spirit in motion. 

Nietzsche would say: This is the Dionysian without disguise.

The forms clash and embrace. There are tensions—waves of red and yellow, bursts of blue, strokes that suggest violence and joy. 

But it never resolves. There is no center. No final truth. Only movement.

Kandinsky called this “inner necessity”—the drive for the spirit to express itself not in symbols, but in pure form, drawn from within. Nietzsche would recognize this immediately as the artist as creator of new values.

Kandinsky is not imitating the world. He is constructing a new aesthetic space—a visual metaphysics where the artist is no longer a servant of representation, but a sorcerer of sensation.

Nietzsche would not ask: What does this mean? He would ask: What does this awaken in me? What forces are stirred by this chaos of color?

And in that way, Composition VII becomes not a painting, but a ritual, a test: Can you still feel joy when the gods are gone, when forms collapse, when the eye has no anchor?

If yes—then you are free.

This is the overman’s art. Not grounded. Not obedient. But exultant, disruptive, affirmative without excuse.

“Here, finally,” Nietzsche would whisper,
“the Apollonian has been shattered—and what flows through the cracks is pure Becoming, shaped only by the artist’s will to sing.”

Kandinsky, through abstraction, remystifies the world—but not with doctrine. With color, rhythm, inner fire. This is painting not for the eye—but for the soul that dares to move without map.