Pictures of

Wassily Kandinsky

Pioneer of abstract art

Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian artist who is considered one of the pioneers of abstract art. He was born on December 4, 1866 in Moscow into a wealthy family. As a child he was interested in music and learned to play the piano and cello. He later studied law and economics before deciding to become an artist in 1896.

Kandinsky moved to Munich, where he studied at the Academy of Art. Here he also met Gabriele Münter, an artist with whom he later had a relationship. It was in Munich that he first came into contact with the art of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and began to create his own works.

In the early 1910s, Kandinsky became increasingly interested in abstract art. He believed that art should reflect not only the outer world, but also the inner world of the artist. In 1911, together with Franz Marc, he founded the artists' group "Der Blaue Reiter," which was dedicated to abstract art.

After training with the well-known salon painter Franz von Stuck, where he first made the acquaintance of Paul Klee in 1900, he founded his own Phalanx school of painting and gradually freed himself from the representational of form in the following years. He first succeeded in developing his own color language during his Murnau phase (1908 -1914).

After these colorful explosive improvisations came the encounter with the Russian Constructivists between 1914 and 1921. There followed the years of his teaching at the Bauhaus (1922 - 1933), during which his now best-known works were created in a tectonically rigorous, through-composed cool style.

It was not until his late phase in Paris, beginning in 1933, that he again developed more playful and generously constructed compositions strongly reminiscent of biological forms and elements - the so-called view through the microscope.

Kandinsky later moved to Russia, where he received a professorship at the Moscow College of Art and Technology. During this time, he created some of his most famous works, such as the Compositions series. Kandinsky believed that color had the ability to express emotion and sensation, and he put this into practice in his art.

After the October Revolution, Kandinsky returned to Germany and taught at the Bauhaus School in Weimar. Here he produced some of his most significant works, such as "Color Study Squares" and "Point and Line to Surface."

With the rise of Nazism in Germany, Kandinsky's art was classified as "degenerate" and he returned to the Soviet Union, where he lived until his death in 1944.

Wassily Kandinsky was a revolutionary artist whose work had a profound influence on the development of abstract art. His experiments with color, form and line have inspired many artists to this day.