Artist

Wassily Kandinsky

1866–1944 · Russian-born; later German and French citizen

Wassily Kandinsky abandoned a legal career for art in the 1890s and moved to Munich, where he became a central organizer of the avant-garde. His increasingly liberated use of color and line helped drive painting toward abstraction. In 1911 he co-founded Der Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc and published On the Spiritual in Art, arguing that color and form could operate independently of observed nature. After returning to Russia during World War I, Kandinsky joined the Bauhaus faculty in 1922, where his language became more geometric. The Nazi closure of the Bauhaus pushed him to France in 1933, where his late paintings brought biomorphic forms into the abstract vocabulary he had spent decades developing.

Painting; watercolor; drawing; printmaking; art theory