Vassily Vassilyevich Kandinsky (16 December 1866 – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter, and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first modern abstract works.

Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa.
He enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose to study law and economics. Quite successful in his profession, he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat . He started painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.

In 1896, he settled in Munich, at that time considered to be one of the centers of the European art , and studied first in the private school of Anton Ažbe and then at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, and studied under Franz Stuck, “German graphic artist Number One”. The master is happy with his student, but considered his palette too bright. Meeting the Master’s requirements, for the whole year Kandinsky drew exclusively in black-and-white spectrum, “studying the form as that”.
From 1906 to 1908 Kandinsky spent a great deal of time travelling across Europe, until he settled in the small Bavarian town of Murnau. The Blue Mountain (1908–1909) was painted at this time and shows more of his trend towards pure abstraction. The broad use of colour illustrates Kandinsky’s move towards an art in which colour is presented independently of form, and which each colour is given equal attention. The composition has also become more planar, as it seems that the painting itself is divided into four sections- the sky, the red tree, the yellow tree, and the blue mountain containing the three riders.

In late 1911. Kandinsky formed a group The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) with like minded artists such as August Macke and Franz Marc. The group released an almanac, The Blue Rider Almanac, and held two exhibits. More of each were planned, but the outbreak of World War I ended these plans.
Kandinsky’s writing in The Blue Rider Almanac and the treatise On the Spiritual In Art, served as both a defense and promotion of abstract art, as well as an appraisal that all forms of art were equally capable of reaching a level of spirituality. He believed that colour could be used in a painting as something autonomous and apart from a visual description of an object or other form.

He went back to Moscow in 1914, after World War I started. He was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow. The unceasing attacks of his colleagues-artists considering his works as “mutilated spiritism” were a determinative for Kandinsky to leave Moscow, and returned to Germany in 1921.
The pressure of socialist ideology upon the art began after 1922. Kandinsky’s pictures for many years are put away from the Soviet museums.

After returning to Germany, Kandinsky accepts an invitation of Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, to move to Weimar where he headed a fresco workshop.

At the Bauhaus, Kandinsky taught the basic design class for beginners and the course on advanced theory, and also conducted painting classes and a workshop where he completed his colour theory with new elements of form psychology. The development of his works on forms study, particularly on point and different forms of lines, lead to the publication of his second major theoretical book Point and Line to Plane in 1926.
Geometrical elements took on increasing importance in his teaching as well as in his painting, particularly circle, half-circle, the angle, straight lines and curves. This period was a period of intense production. The freedom of which is characterised in each of his works by the treatment of planes rich in colours and magnificent gradations as in the painting Yellow – red – blue (1925), where Kandinsky shows his distance from constructivism and suprematism movements whose influence was increasing at this time.

After a fierce slander campaign from the Nazis, the Bauhaus was closed in 1933, and Kandinsky left Germany and settled in Paris.

The Parisian artistic environment turned to be reserved to Kandinsky’s presence.
The reasons for that were his isolation from foreign colleagues and absence of recognition of abstract painting in general. At this time the last transformation of his painting system happened.
Now Kandinsky did not use a combination of primary colours but worked with soft, refined, subtle nuances of colour. Kandinsky’s pictures of this period Sky Blue (1940), Complex-Simple (1939), Colourful Ensemble (1938), are far from the feeling of “cold romanticism”, in them life seethes and boils. The artist named this period of his creativity to be “really a picturesque fairy tale”.

During the war-time period because of the shortage of materials the formats of his pictures become ever less, up to that moment when the artist was compelled to be content with gouache painting on cardboards of a small format. And again he confronted with aversion of the public and colleagues.

Kandinsky up to the very end had not doubted his “inner world”, the world of images where the abstraction was not an end in itself, and the language of forms was not “deadborn”; they arose from will to pithiness and vitality.

He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine, France in 1944.

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