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Wassily Kandinsky
Moscow, 1866-Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1944
Kandinsky was the artist who pioneered twentieth-century abstract art.
While still a child, Kandinsky studied music and drawing before going to Moscow University to read Law. In 1893 he was engaged by the Law Faculty in Moscow, but after looking at a painting by Monet he decided to abandon his profession in favour of painting. He moved to Munich, at that time a centre of modern art, where he studied at the academy of the painter Anton Azbe, then at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. In 1904 he travelled around Europe and visited Tunisia with the painter Gabriele Münter. From 1906 to 1907 he lived in Paris.
In 1909 the writings of Worringer and the music of his contemporary Arnold Schönberg led Kandinsky to become increasingly interested in non-objective art. The artist was troubled by the materialism of the world around him and saw in abstraction a route to freedom for modern man.
In 1911, together with Franz Marc, Kandinsky began to publish the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a publication which attracted a varied group of artists to become associated with it. For Kandinsky, art had a mystical role. This art was non-objective, responding not to external visual appearances, but rather to the artist's interior force. His writings, among them Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912) and Point and Line on the Plane (1926), served to disseminate his ideas.
In 1914 Kandinsky returned to Moscow where he held the important position of member of the Committee of Popular Education. However, when the Socialists Realist aesthetic became the prevailing one in Russia, the artist returned to Germany where he became one of the most important figures at the Weimar Bauhaus. At this time his own painting became influenced by the geometricising tendency of the Bauhaus aesthetic.
In 1933 Kandinsky fled to Paris, moving to Neuilly-sur-Seine on the outskirts of the city where he painted abstract works with the freedom of his earliest period.
Roethel, H. K. and Benjamin, J. K.: Kandinsky. Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings. London, 1987.
Lindsay, K. C. and Vergo, P.: Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art. Boston-London, 1982.
Vergo, P.: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. Twentieth-century German Painting. London, 1992.
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