In addition to music, color fascinated Kandinsky, as it did many of his contemporaries in abstract art. "Color...had a deep and vital meaning for him...though he later turned to the invention of geometric or linear images..." (Palmer 632). He participated in the "antirationalist or vitalistic philosophies of the period" (632).

Kandinsky called upon painters to free themselves from the material world and affirmed "the power of art to speak to the intellect and intuition...without the...familiar objects of the material world" (Witt 408). He thought of himself as a pioneer, knowing that future artists would "...play on color harmonies as musicians play on the harmonies of the scale" (408). He seems to embrace the "buzzing, booming confusion of Einstein's universe in which all matter is energy" (408).

Adam and Eve (1912)
Born Jewish and poor in tsarist Russia, Marc Chagall went to Paris to study in 1910, a Paris alive with artistic ferment and creativity; there he met and was influenced by the trends (Cubism) and artists such as the Fauvists and Picasso; he returned to Russia in 1914.

Chagall's work "...weaves dreamlike memories of Russian folk tales Jewish proverbs, and the Russian countryside into...[a]...glowing vision" (Janson 526). The influence on Chagall of the Fauvists and of Cubism are evident. On his return to Russia, he worked in the Jewish theatre until 1923 when he went first to Berlin and then to Paris. "Colour governed his compositions, calling up chimerical processions of memory where reality and the imaginary are woven into a single legend..." (Harden, Artchive). Though he spent a few years in New York, the remainder of his career he spent in France, where "commissions poured in" (Harden, Artchive).