Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky lived from 16 December 1866 to 13 December 1944. He was a Russian painter and art theorist who worked in Germany during the late Belle Époque and the years between the world wars. He is widely seen as one of the first artists to create abstract works in the Western tradition.

Kandinsky was born in Moscow. His father, Vassily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, was a tea merchant, and his mother was Lidia Ticheeva. One of his great-grandmothers was a princess named Gantimurova. As a child, he was fascinated by colour, and this interest in colour symbolism and psychology stayed with him. He studied many subjects, including law and economics. At age 23, in 1889, he joined an ethnographic research trip to the Vologda region. He later wrote that the brightly coloured houses and churches there made him feel as if he were stepping into a painting. This experience, along with the local folk art—especially its use of vivid colours against dark backgrounds—showed up in much of his early work. A few years after that, he began comparing painting to music, writing that colour is like a keyboard, the eyes are harmony, and the soul is a piano with many strings, with the artist as the hand that plays it. He was also the uncle of the philosopher Alexandre Kojève.

He did not start studying painting—life-drawing, sketching, and anatomy—until he was 30. In 1896, he moved to Munich, where he studied at Anton Ažbe’s private school and later at the Academy of Fine Arts. There, he first taught and then became the partner of German artist Gabriele Münter. Before leaving Moscow that same year, he saw an exhibition of Monet’s paintings. He was especially struck by *Haystacks*; the colours felt powerful almost independently of the objects themselves. He later recalled being confused and pained that he could not recognise the haystack, but the image stayed with him, and he felt painting had taken on a fairy-tale power. He was also influenced by Wagner’s *Lohengrin*, which he thought pushed music beyond standard lyricism, and by the theosophical ideas of Madame Blavatsky. Theosophy sees creation as a geometric progression starting from a single point, expressed through circles, triangles, and squares—ideas that echoed in his books *Concerning the Spiritual in Art* (1910) and *Point and Line to Plane* (1926). Visual illustrations by John Varley in *Thought-Forms* (1901) also shaped his work.

Kandinsky’s path to abstraction came after a long period of thought and artistic growth. He called his focus on inner beauty and spiritual desire “inner necessity.” Some art historians think his turn to abstraction began when he came home one day and saw one of his own paintings hanging upside down; he stared at it for a while before realising it was his own, which suggested the power of abstraction. In the summer of 1902, he invited Münter to join his summer painting classes in the Alps, and their relationship became personal. Around this time, he started to become known as an art theorist as well as a painter. Many of his early works from the 1900s are landscapes and towns painted with broad colours and recognisable forms, though they rarely include human figures. Exceptions include *Sunday, Old Russia* (1904), a colourful, fanciful scene of peasants and nobles, and *Couple on Horseback* (1907), which shows a man and woman riding past a Russian town, with pointillist spots of colour in the leaves, town, and river reflections.

After World War I broke out in 1914, Kandinsky returned to Moscow. Following the Russian Revolution, he became involved in the cultural administration under Anatoly Lunacharsky and helped found the Museum of the Culture of Painting. But his spiritual outlook did not fit with the materialism of Soviet society, and opportunities in Germany drew him back in 1920. From 1922 until the Nazis shut it down in 1933, he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture. After that, he moved to France, where he spent the rest of his life. He became a French citizen in 1939 and produced some of his most famous work there. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.