Kandinsky and Cage Converge in Reggio Emilia Exhibition on Synesthesia

Fondazione Magnani in Reggio Emilia opens a new season with a rigorous exhibition exploring the synesthetic relationship between art and music, starting from Richard Wagner's concept of the total artwork. The show features a sketch of Wagner's Lohengrin, which anticipates the spiritual abstraction that Wassily Kandinsky would later develop in his writings. German Symbolist Max Klinger reinterprets Brahms's music, while Arnold Schönberg, Cage's teacher and inventor of dodecaphony, appears as a painter of theatrical sketches. A substantial corpus of Kandinsky's early Compositions references musical instruments and pieces. Works by Blaue Reiter members Marianne von Werefkin and Paul Klee are included, alongside pieces by Fausto Melotti, Giulio Turcato, and Nicolas De Staël. The exhibition concludes with a broad section on John Cage, featuring his Plexigram II (1969) and a silence room where the heartbeat becomes a score. Hand-colored Russian lubok prints from the 19th century, such as The Bird of Paradise, Sirin, are also on view.