Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky is generally credited with the first purely abstract paintings in Western art. Born in Moscow in 1866 to a wealthy tea merchant's family, he studied law and economics and was offered a professorship at Dorpat, which he turned down at thirty to become a painter — a decision he attributed to two experiences: Monet's Haystacks, in which he could not identify the subject and found the picture powerful regardless, and a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin. He had synaesthesia, perceiving colours as sounds, and his theoretical writing treats painting as a form of music: colour as pitch, form as rhythm, the artist striking the soul as a hand strikes a keyboard. He moved to Munich in 1896 and studied there. A second decisive moment came around 1908 when he returned to his studio at dusk and saw a canvas of extraordinary beauty that he could not read — one of his own paintings lying on its side, unrecognisable and better for it. Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in 1911, argues that art should express inner necessity rather than describe objects, and that materialism had exhausted representation. That year he co-founded Der Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc. His first non-representational works date from around 1910-13, and the Compositions of that period abandon subject matter while retaining traces of apocalyptic imagery — riders, mountains, cannon. He returned to Russia in 1914, held administrative posts after the revolution, and left in 1921 as the state turned against abstraction. He taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933, and his geometric period dates from there. He died near Paris in 1944.

• Lived: 1866 CE – 1944 CE
• Nationality: Russian
• Roles: painter, writer