There is method in this madness

So forget all that stuff. It is no more than the befuddling spin-off of that simple “inner necessity” that made a Russian law teacher decide to leave his university post at the age of 30 and dedicate himself to his boyhood dream of becoming a painter instead. It was not to prove an easy path. But moving forward slowly, by way of “innumerable experiments, despair, hopes and discoveries”, Kandinsky earned a place in art history as one of the great pioneers of abstraction. It is this place that this show now explores.

Two experiences in 1896 set him on his way. One was seeing Claude Monet’s Haystack. Surprised and a little upset by the indistinct blur, he was nonetheless fascinated to find that the image left an indelible imprint on his memory. “I was unable to draw simple conclusions,” he said. But what was quite clear “was that the palette had a strength that I had never before suspected . . . Painting acquired a fairytale splendour.”

The other was a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin. It transported him to another plane. “All my colours were conjured up before my eyes,” he exclaimed. “Wild, almost mad, lines drew themselves before me.”

Painting, he realised in the midst of what is now commonly explained as a synaesthetic experience (a condition caused by some mental cross-wiring that makes one appreciate sounds, colours or words with two or more senses: to see musical notes, for instance), “was capable of developing powers of exactly the same order as those that music expressed.” The man who as a boy had heard his paint-box hiss used the vocabulary of music to break down the boundaries that circumscribed art. “Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings,” he explained.

Leaving Moscow to study in Munich, Kandinsky was to spend several years travelling, experimenting and learning before he reached the starting point of this new Tate show, which by way of a brief prologue presents a couple of ornamental figurative images to represent his early career. Their subject matter — an Arab city and a Russian boating scene — reveal respectively his interest in the exotic and his nostalgia for the romantic folkloric traditions of the homeland that he had left.

But the show really begins with paintings that he did in Murnau, a small town in the Bavarian Alps, where, having summered there with his mistress and fellow artist Gabriele Münter, he settled in 1909. He worked rapidly and passionately, trying to sort out, make sense of and develop in his own distinctive way the many influences he had encountered in several years of travel.

The fierce, joyous vigour of Fauvist colours appear to have been his initial inspiration. “Houses and trees made hardly any impression on my thoughts,” he wrote. “I used the palette knife to spread lines and splashes of paint on the canvas and make them sing as loudly as I could.”

Bit by bit, through the sequences of bright little squares, the spectator sees him developing: flattening out the picture plane, freeing the energy of line, unleashing the power of colour and letting it take on a life of its own as he exposes the more profound expressive purposes that lie beneath the surfaces of decorative effect.

Take a work such as Murnau — The Garden II, for instance, painted in 1910. You can see that it is a landscape. You can make out the tumbling buildings, the blaze of the sunflowers, the pink-tinted clouds that scud across dark skies. But the descriptions are starting to jumble, to dissolve into patterns. Reality seems almost to be slipping down the precipitous horizon, making way for a world in which colour alone can have power.

Gradually as you walk through this show — through his so-called “impressions” (paintings based on observations of the natural world), his “improvisations” (spontaneous expressions of mood) and his “compositions” (also about inner visions, but executed, a bit like symphonies, on a grander scale) — you move ever deeper into the world of abstraction.

The towers and hill towns, the angels, horsemen and boats of his earlier pictures become increasingly hard to discern. They are replaced with patches of colour, which, he hoped, would sing together like musical chords; working together to make complex colour harmonies that would set up “psychic vibrations” in the brain.

His Composition VII, a vast canvas completed in four days in 1913, releases the full force of his abstraction upon the spectator. This (one of several pieces on very rare loan from Russian museums) is the sort of painting that is utterly betrayed by reproduction. To appreciate its subtlety and complexity, its dynamism and beauty, one must stand and gaze into the real thing and be befuddled by the play of surfaces and depths.

“Painting is a thunderous collision of different worlds which, in mutual combat are destined to shape and name the new world,” Kandinsksy said. This is the new world that the spectator now enters. It still feels so fresh, revealing the emotions and passions that lie behind life. It reveals a spiritual realm.

“The more abstract its form, the more clear and direct its appeal,” declared Kandinsky. This is a show to make you understand him instinctively. Its art-historical arguments may be clearly posited, but the constant temptation is simply to forget them: just to stand there and revel in the immediacy of your response, in that sense of a chord strumming somewhere inside you, so easy to feel and yet so difficult to analyse.

Yes, his paintings are decorative. Their maelstrom of colours and calligraphies are obviously appealing. But they also speak of deeper — and often darker — currents that well up from passionate engagement with a world in political and artistic flux.

“Mystery speaking through mysteries . . . isn’t that the meaning? Isn’t that the conscious or unconscious purpose of the compulsive urge to create?” asked Kandinsky. And seeing this show, what more, indeed, could we want?

Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction is at Tate Modern, SE1 (020-7887 8888), from Thursday to October 1