Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was a Russian painter, born in Moscow, who is widely credited as one of the pioneers of abstract art. He trained in law and economics and began studying art in Munich in 1896, at the age of thirty. He helped found the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, led it from 1909, and in 1911 co-founded the Der Blaue Reiter group with Franz Marc and others. The same year he published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a defence of non-representational painting. His works of these years, such as Blue Mountain (1908–09) and Composition VI (1913), move from landscape towards pure colour and form. After the outbreak of the First World War he returned to Moscow. From 1922 he taught at the Bauhaus until the Nazis closed it in 1933, then moved to Paris. His later paintings include Yellow – Red – Blue (1925) and Composition X (1939). He became a French citizen in 1939 and died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.