Kandinsky, Vasily (1866–1944)

Russian-born painter. He was a pioneer of abstract art. Between 1910 and 1914 he produced the series Improvisations and Compositions, the first known examples of purely abstract work in 20th-century art. He was an originator of the expressionist Blaue Reiter movement 1911–12, and taught at the Bauhaus school of design in Germany 1921–33.

Born in Moscow, he studied in Munich and in 1902 joined the Berlin Sezession. He travelled widely 1903–08, finally settling in Murnau with the painter Gabriele Münter. By this stage his original experiments with post-Impressionist styles had given way to a fauvist freedom of colour and form. These early paintings used glowing mosaic-like colours to evoke a fairy-tale world inspired by Russian folklore. The elements of his paintings – such as a horse and rider – gradually became more and more abstract as he concentrated exclusively on the expressive qualities of colour and line.

He spent World War I in Russia and his work after his return to Germany shows the influence of Malevich and Lissitzky in its more disciplined structure. His abstract works had few imitators, but his theories on composition, published in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), were taken up by the abstractionists. Further theories were published in Reminiscences (1913) and Point and Line to Plane (1926).

A teacher at the Bauhaus in 1922, he left Nazi Germany for Paris in 1933, becoming a French citizen in 1939.