Executed in 1907, Vanitas perfectly exemplifies the folk and fairytale period in W.Kandinsky’s artistic career. The liberated approach to colour drawn on Fauvism and the Nabis, encouraged the artist to employ the divisionist brush-stroke, with the colour being used at its maximum intensity. The use of bright, accurately chosen hues testifies to the role of pure colour getting more important in Kandinsky’s art. As in music, Kandinsky’s art has many voices. The tones of colour create a form on canvas. The artist described his associations with colour and music in books that are still of great interest to those who explore the art of the Russian avant-gardist.

The “mosaic” of striking colors against a black (dark) background in previous works by Kandinsky reached its full formal and conceptual expression in “Colorful Life.” The picture’s title in Russian uses the word pyostry (German – Bunt), in the senses of “multi-colored” (“multi-colored hills” in a northern landscape; “multi-colored ornaments” in peasant frescoes) and “multi-faceted” (“multi-faceted complexity” of Russia).

The actual subject of the picture lies in the diversity of the vital paths depicted. The mystical spiritualization of earthly, bodily life should combine the multi-colored world of paganist wisdom with Christian spirituality and fuse “the joyous colors of life” into “the unified white color of Resurrection.” [Merezhkovsky 1998: 147-148].