Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated from Odessa Art School. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics, and went on to teach both subjects. He was successful in his profession and was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat (today Tartu, Estonia). In Moscow, he saw an exhibition of paintings by Monet. He was particularly taken with the impressionistic style of Haystacks; this, to him, had a powerful sense of colour almost independent of the objects themselves. 

In 1896, at the age of 30, Kandinsky gave up his promising teaching career to pursue an artistic one, settling in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbe's private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts. From 1906 to 1908, Kandinsky spent a great deal of time travelling across Europe (he was an associate of the Blue Rose symbolist group of Moscow) until he settled in the small Bavarian town of Murnau. In 1908, he bought a copy of Thought-Forms by Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater with illustrations by John Varley, which influenced him visually. In 1909, he joined the Theosophical Society. 

He returned to Moscow in 1914 after the outbreak of World War I. Following the Russian Revolution, Kandinsky 'became an insider in the cultural administration of Anatoly Lunacharsky' and helped establish the Museum of the Culture of Painting. However, by then, 'his spiritual outlook... was foreign to the argumentative materialism of Soviet society' and opportunities beckoned in Germany, to which he returned in 1920. There, he taught at the Bauhaus School of Art and Architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939 and producing some of his most prominent art. 

Kandinsky's creation of abstract work followed an extended period of development and maturation of intense thought based on his artistic experiences. He called this devotion to inner beauty, fervour of spirit and spiritual desire 'inner necessity'; it was a central aspect of his art. Some art historians suggest that Kandinsky's passion for abstract art began when one day, coming back home, he found one of his own paintings hanging upside down in his studio and he stared at it for a while before realising it was his own work, suggesting to him the potential power of abstraction. Later in life, he would recall being fascinated and stimulated by colour as a child. His fascination with colour symbolism and psychology continued as he grew.

Kandinsky was similarly influenced during this period by Richard Wagner's Lohengrin which, he felt, pushed the limits of music and melody beyond standard lyricism. He was also spiritually influenced by Madame Blavatsky (1831–1891), the best-known exponent of theosophy. Theosophical theory postulates that creation is a geometrical progression, beginning with a single point. The creative aspect of the form is expressed by a descending series of circles, triangles and squares. Kandinsky's book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910) and Point and Line to Plane (1926) echoed this theosophical tenet.

Kandinsky died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in France in 1944.