Wassily Kandinsky: The Complete Story
Wassily Kandinsky was the Russian painter widely credited with making the first purely abstract art, the man who said he could hear colors and see music, and who walked away from a law career at the age of thirty to chase paint. He turned the canvas into a symphony of line and color, and wrote the book that taught the world to take abstraction seriously.
Kandinsky wanted painting to do what music does: move you directly, with no story to explain. That simple, radical idea helped invent abstract art.
He saw music and heard color
Kandinsky seems to have had synesthesia, a crossing of the senses in which a sound carries a color and a color rings like a note. He titled his works Compositions and Improvisations, borrowing from music on purpose, and believed the right abstract arrangement of color could touch the soul as directly as a chord.
The leap into abstraction
Around 1910 he began letting recognizable subjects dissolve into pure shape and color. He told a story about it: coming into his studio at dusk, he saw a glowing, beautiful painting he could not identify, until he realized it was one of his own canvases lying on its side. The subject had vanished and the beauty had not. That, he decided, was the future.
The book that argued for abstraction
In 1911 he published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a short, intense book arguing that color and form carry meaning on their own, without copying the world. It became the manifesto a whole generation of abstract painters leaned on, and it is still in print today.
The Blue Rider
In Munich he co founded Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider, a circle of artists pushing toward freer, more spiritual color. It was one of the engines of German Expressionism, and it placed Kandinsky at the center of the European avant garde just as everything was about to change.
Bauhaus, then exile
Kandinsky taught for years at the Bauhaus, the famous German design school, where his style grew crisp and geometric, full of circles and grids. When the Nazis shut the Bauhaus down and branded his work degenerate, he fled to Paris, where he painted his strange, biomorphic final pictures until his death in 1944.
Quick answers about Wassily Kandinsky
Who was Wassily Kandinsky? A Russian painter, a pioneer of abstract art.
When was he born? In Moscow, in 1866.
When did he die? In Neuilly, near Paris, in 1944.
What is he famous for? Among the first purely abstract paintings and the book Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
What did he do before painting? He trained and taught as a lawyer until the age of thirty.
Where can I see his work? The Guggenheim in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris hold major groups.
Kandinsky gave up a respectable life in law at thirty to gamble on color, then lived to see the Nazis hang his paintings in a show meant to mock them. He died near Paris in 1944, and the abstract language he helped invent now fills museums on every continent.