Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky was the 20th century's most persuasive practitioner and theorist of abstract art. Kandinsky was a great music lover, and his paintings often make the connection between chords and color. Born in 1866 in Russia, he studied law and economics at the University of Moscow. It was not until his early 30s that Kandinsky decided to become an artist, prompted in part by an exhibition of French Impressionists in Moscow in the mid-1890s. He moved to Munich to study art in 1897, and by 1901 had formed the artist group Phalanx. Kandinsky traveled extensively over the next decade - Venice, Holland, Tunisia and back to Russia. On the Spiritual in Art, published in 1911, established him as an important theoretician of the avant-garde. His abstract watercolors and lithographs influenced a generation of artists. During WWI he returned to Russia, and after the revolution worked to build academies and museums there. He taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where his work took on more geometric forms. Along with Klee, Feininger, and Von Jawlensky, Kandinsky formed the Die Blaue Vier group and toured and lectured together throughout the 1920s. The Bauhaus was closed by the Nazi regime in 1932 and many of his works were branded as degenerate art and later destroyed. Kandinsky moved to France and obtained French citizenship. Although he was now isolated from the community of his fellow Bauhaus artists, Kandinsky continued to work, revisiting the themes of his earlier work, and synthesizing them into new and richer forms. Kandinsky died in 1944.
