Kandinsky, colour and cinema
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was hugely influential in developing abstract art that invoked colour as a major component. Having studied colour theory extensively—from scientist Sir Isaac Newton to poet Goethe—Kandinsky tried to explain how we experience colour. Writing in 1910, before colour film existed, his ideas about colour had a broad impact across all art forms, interior design, and advertising. Yellow, according to Kandinsky, “assails every obstacle blindly and bursts forth aimlessly in every direction.” He saw yellow as having “a disturbing influence” with an “insistent, aggressive character” that “increases the painful shrillness of its note.” Yellow was “the typically earthly colour” that “can never have profound meaning,” and he paralleled it “with madness…with violent raving lunacy.”[1]
While yellow is associated with the sun and summer, in Western culture, it also represents cowardice and greed. Yet in Imperial China, the royal family wore yellow exclusively as descendants of the sacred Sun.
KANDINSKY’S COLOR THEORY IN PAINTING AND CINEMA
John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1919), one of World War I’s greatest paintings, shows soldiers blinded by mustard gas—a yellow-brown sulfur weapon that destroys skin and lungs. The painting references Bruegel’s The Blind Leading the Blind while making the yellow both literal and symbolic. Sargent’s sickly yellow palette recalls mustard gas, creating not cheerful sunshine yellow but “illness yellow” that makes viewers feel squeamish and uncomfortable.[2]
In Jacob’s Ladder (1990), director Adrian Lyne and DP Jeffrey L. Kimball dominate the palette with sickly yellows, washed-out greens, and dull blues. The film follows a Vietnam veteran’s horrific hallucinations, using various yellow tones—from helicopter dust to tropical sunrise to hospital scenes—to suggest distorted wrongness and echo Kandinsky’s connection between yellow and lunacy. The colour shifts from threatening to reassuring, leaving viewers questioning Jacob’s sanity.
[1] “Yellow, if steadily gazed at in any geometrical form, has a disturbing influence, and reveals in the colour an insistent, aggressive character. The intensification of the yellow increases the painful shrillness of its note. Yellow is the typically earthly colour. It can never have profound meaning. An inter-mixture of blue makes it a sickly colour. It may be paralleled in human nature, with madness, not with melancholy or hypochondriacal mania, but rather with violent raving lunacy”. Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky.
[2] Gassed, a renowned painting from 1919 by American artist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), depicts the horrific aftermath of a mustard gas attack on the Western Front during World War I. Sargent witnessed the scene firsthand in August 1918 and transformed this experience into the painting, which portrays blindfolded, wounded soldiers stumbling towards a dressing station. The painting, a public commission for a Hall of Remembrance, memorializes the human cost of the war and is now part of the collection at the Imperial War Museums.
