Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky the Russian painter and art theorist (1866-1944), a pioneer of abstract art and a central figure of the Expressionist movement in Germany. His belief that colour and form could express spiritual and emotional states without reference to the visible world made him one of the founders of a purely non-objective painting.

Origins and Path to Art

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866 into a prosperous family. He studied law and economics at the University of Moscow and was appointed to a teaching post, but an exhibition of French Impressionist painting and an encounter with a painting by Monet, in which the subject dissolved into a mass of colour, convinced him that art could speak without a recognisable subject.

In 1896 he gave up his academic career and moved to Munich, then one of the liveliest centres of the German avant-garde, to study painting. He trained under Anton Azbe and Franz von Stuck and absorbed the various currents of Jugendstil, Symbolism and Post-Impressionism, and he began to develop the interest in colour and the inner life that would define his art.

His early journeys, especially to North Africa and to Russia, deepened his sense of the expressive power of ornament, folk art and colour, and they reinforced his conviction that painting should address the spirit rather than imitate appearances. His move toward abstraction would be gradual and theoretically grounded.

Munich, the Blue Rider and Toward Abstraction

In Munich Kandinsky became a leading figure among the artists of the Neue Kunstlervereinigung and then, with Franz Marc, founded the Blue Rider, an association that gathered painters and musicians around a shared belief in the spiritual mission of art. The group's almanac, published in 1912, placed painting and music alongside folk art and non-European imagery.

His paintings of these years moved steadily away from landscape toward a language of glowing colour and calligraphic line. The first abstract watercolour, often dated to 1910, discarded the object altogether, and by 1913 large canvases introduced the turbulent, semi-abstract compositions that he called Improvisations and Compositions, in which colour and form carry the whole expressive burden.

He was deeply interested in the analogy between painting and music. He borrowed the terms improvisation and composition from music, held that colour had a direct effect upon the soul comparable to that of sound, and looked for correspondences between specific colours and musical timbres. This synaesthetic theory underpinned his claim that abstract form could move the viewer as powerfully as a chord.

Concerning the Spiritual in Art

In 1911 Kandinsky published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a treatise that became one of the founding documents of modern art. He argued that the true aim of art is the expression of an inner necessity and the elevation of the soul, and that materialism and imitation were leading painting into a dead end.

He proposed a language of colour and form in which each element possesses its own spiritual value: yellow, for example, is warm and aggressive and can suggest a trumpet, while blue is deep, calm and spiritual. Forms too, he argued, carry meaning, and their arrangement should be governed by the inner need of the artist rather than by external rules.

The book gave the emerging abstraction a philosophical justification and connected it to a wider critique of modern society. It was widely read and translated, and it supplied the theoretical vocabulary that many of his contemporaries adopted in their own journey toward non-objective painting.

Bauhaus Years and Geometric Abstraction

After the First World War Kandinsky returned to Germany and taught at the Bauhaus, first in Weimar and later in Dessau, where he worked alongside Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and other teachers. The school became the most influential centre of modernist teaching in Europe, and Kandinsky's courses on form and colour shaped generations of designers and artists.

His painting of this period became cooler and more geometric, dominated by circles, triangles and straight lines placed in clear relationships. He wrote Point and Line to Plane, a systematic study of the elements of form and their psychological effects, which stands beside his earlier treatise as a statement of his theoretical position.

The increasing abstraction and discipline of his Bauhaus work has sometimes been read as a move away from the emotional charge of his earlier painting, but in his own account the geometric elements were still carriers of feeling. When the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazi authorities in 1933, he left Germany for France.

Final Years and Influence

Kandinsky settled at Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, where he lived in modest circumstances during the German occupation and continued to work. His late canvases, such as the compositions on which he reflected in his final theoretical writings, combine the geometric vocabulary of the Bauhaus with a new freedom and warmth, and show his continuing search for a synthesis of form and feeling.

He died at Neuilly in 1944. His influence on the development of abstract art and on the theory of colour and form was immense. The abstract painting of the twentieth century, from the Constructivists to the Abstract Expressionists, owes a great deal to the example he set and to the arguments he made.

He is remembered both as a painter and as a thinker, one of the rare artists whose writings are as important as his pictures. His insistence that art is a spiritual activity, and that its forms are not bound to the imitation of nature, remains a defining idea of modern culture.

See also

• Abstract art
• The Blue Rider
• Bauhaus
• Concerning the Spiritual in Art