ABSTRACT

Wassily Kandisky (1866 1944) and Arnold Schönberg (1874 1951) met on New Year’s Eve 1911 and began a fruitful relationship of friendship and esteem, which ended only many years later due to a misunderstanding, in a time of anti Semitic struggle. Between the expressionist painter and the composer of dodecafonist music, a relationship was born based on themes that also touched on spiritual and faith issues, not only those that were purely artistic. The study retraces all these aspects of their rich correspondence, from which it emerges that both were fascinated by the artistic innovations that the early twentieth century offered; furthermore, both studied the issues relating to the inner voice and the work between the conscious and the unconscious, inherent in artistic “construction”, as well as the level of the emotions of the soul. A final aspect covered in the study is an attempt to study, in this relationship between the two, a certain “liturgical openness”, which could determine some subsequent study on the matter.