Wassily Kandinsky
The theorist of abstraction.
Kandinsky wrote about the spiritual in art and compared colours to musical notes. He co-founded Der Blaue Reiter and later taught at the Bauhaus.
Wassily Kandinsky was born in 1866 in Moscow and grew up in Odessa. He studied law and economics in Moscow and had a promising academic career ahead of him. But in 1896, at the age of thirty, he gave it all up to become an artist. He later recounted that one of Monet’s haystacks and a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin convinced him that colour and form could act directly on the emotions.
He moved to Munich and studied under Anton Ažbe and at the academy under Franz von Stuck. He founded the artists’ group Phalanx and there met the painter Gabriele Münter, who became his companion for more than ten years. Together they painted in Murnau in Bavaria, where his landscapes grew ever more colourful and simplified.
Around 1910–1911 he took the step into abstract painting. In 1911 he founded Der Blaue Reiter together with Franz Marc, and the same year saw the publication of his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. In it he described how colours can sound like musical notes, and how art can express an inner reality. He divided his works into Impressions, Improvisations and Compositions. Composition VII of 1913 is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. When the first abstract painting was made is disputed, and Hilma af Klint was working abstractly even earlier, but Kandinsky was the one who made abstraction known and gave it a theoretical foundation.
When the First World War broke out he had to leave Germany. He met Münter for the last time in Stockholm in 1915–1916. After a few years in revolutionary Russia he returned to Germany in 1921 and from 1922 taught at the Bauhaus. There his forms became geometric, with circles, triangles and lines. He wrote the book Point and Line to Plane in 1926.
When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933 he moved to Neuilly outside Paris, where he died in 1944. He is regarded as one of the most important pioneers of abstract art, and his writings influenced views of art throughout the 20th century.