10 things to know about Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866 to a multicultural, bourgeois family: his father was a tea merchant from Siberia, his mother descended from Mongolian aristocracy. He trained as a lawyer, and was associate professor of law at Moscow University before ever picking up a paintbrush. Everything changed when, in 1896, he came upon a painting from Monet’s ‘Haystack’ series in an exhibition — and was awestruck. As Kandinsky would later put it, the way the worldly forms dissolved into a blaze of colour ‘surpassed my wildest dreams’.

That year, at the age of 30, Kandinsky abandoned his career and moved to Munich to study art. Among the early styles he embraced were Impressionism and Jugendstil (the German equivalent of Art Nouveau). Travels across the rest of Europe followed, before he settled with his lover, Gabriele Münter, in the picturesque Bavarian town of Murnau in the foothills of the Alps.

Works from this time — such as Murnau — Strasse (1908) and Murnau — Ansicht mit Burg, Kirche und Eisenbahn (1909) — mark a stunning advance. Bathed in high-key colour, they show the influence of Henri Matisse and the Fauves. Even more striking is the way Kandinsky simplified the forms of the town and surrounding landscape, reducing them to basic shapes. This was a crucial period in his transition towards abstraction.

Kandinsky wasn’t religious in the traditional sense, but he was deeply spiritual. Among the thinkers who most influenced him was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875, who contended that there is a higher, immaterial realm beyond the visible world.

In the painting Strandszene (‘beach scene’), Kandinsky provided what appears to be a glimpse of that realm: a rich patch of red at the top of the canvas, beneath which human figures toil in the material world. In 1911, he wrote On the Spiritual in Art, a text in which he outlined the transcendental potential of art, suggesting that it should no longer depend upon discernible reality. His thinking in that treatise brought him one step closer to abstraction.

Alongside Münter, Franz Marc and a few others, Kandinsky briefly formed part of a group called Der Blaue Reiter (‘The Blue Rider’). This loose association of experimental painters first showed their work together in Munich, before exhibiting in Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm gallery in Berlin. Walden was so taken by Kandinsky’s work that, in 1912, he offered the artist his first solo show. It left the majority of critics bemused. Oskar Bie, of the Berliner Börsen-Courier newspaper, wrote that he couldn’t make ‘head nor tail’ of the semi-abstract objects and figures.

Kandinsky was a keen lover of music, and counted Richard Wagner among his favourite composers. He also saw a strong affinity between music and painting, believing in the perceptual phenomenon of synaesthesia — according to which the stimulation of one sense leads to the stimulation of another. He thought that the colours and marks in a painting triggered particular sounds, just as the musical notes in a symphony triggered particular visions.

Kandinsky also gave music-inspired titles to three different categories of paintings: his ‘Compositions’, ‘Improvisations’ and ‘Impressions’.

Of composers who can be said to have influenced his art, one stands out: Arnold Schoenberg, the avant-garde Austrian, who set aside conventional rules of harmony in favour of a new, atonal approach. This was congruous with an art liberated from the obligation to represent external appearances.

Kandinsky is hailed, alongside Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, as one of the fathers of abstract art, and in the years leading up to the First World War (considered by many a highpoint of Kandinsky’s career), he accelerated towards non-representational painting. In works such as Improvisation mit Pferden (Studie für Improvisation 20), dating from 1911, colour is no longer contained by line, and Kandinsky essayed a new kind of imagery in which form took precedence over content.

He realised he was placing new demands on his viewers, declaring that ‘an evolution in observance is necessary’. According to Professor Rose-Carol Washton Long, an authority on Kandinksy, this meant the spectator ‘taking part in the creation of the work almost as if taking part in a mystic ritual… Kandinsky forces [us] to decipher mysterious images.’ In Improvisation mit Pferden, for example, is the line of riders ascending into the top-right corner meant to suggest a journey towards spiritual awakening?

When Germany declared war on Russia in 1914, Kandinsky became an enemy alien and was forced to return to his homeland. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, he briefly — and enthusiastically — served as a commissar in the new regime’s Culture Ministry. He also participated in a number of group exhibitions. In time, however, as limits began to be placed on creative freedoms, Kandinsky (with his wife Nina, whom he had married in 1917) decided to return to Germany.

In 1921, at the age of 55, Kandinsky moved to Weimar to teach mural painting and introductory analytical drawing at the newly founded Bauhaus school. There, he worked alongside the likes of Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. He had lost none of his messianic zeal, and believed fully in the Bauhaus philosophy of social improvement through art.

Schwarz und Violett (1923), Tiefes Braun (1924) and Oben und links (1925) are typical of his work from this period: still abstract, but now marked by geometrical components such as grids, triangles and circles.

Order and balance of composition became key, which was consistent with Bauhaus thinking that art should be used in the service of better-designed buildings and objects for everyday use.

In 1933, not long after assuming power in Germany, the Nazi party closed the Bauhaus, prompting Kandinsky and his wife to move to the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Initially, they hoped the relocation would be for just a year or two, after which time they expected politics in Germany to have cooled. ‘We aren’t leaving for good,’ he wrote in 1934 to his friend the art critic Will Grohmann. ‘I couldn’t do that; my roots are too deep in German soil.’

In 1937, however, Nazi authorities ordered the removal of 57 pieces by Kandinsky from the nation’s museums. Fourteen of these were included in the infamous Entartete Kunst (‘degenerate art’) exhibition that opened in Munich the same year — the show in which Hitler displayed the works of avant-garde artists he deemed to be ‘driving forces of corruption’. Kandinsky became a French citizen in 1939.

In France, Kandinsky’s art took a bold new direction. In works such as Rigide et courbé (1935) and Le Rond rouge (1939), he began to introduce more playful, non-geometrical, biomorphic shapes. These evoked the embryos, larvae, plankton and other minuscule life forms he had observed through a microscope — as well as ancient hieroglyphs and pictographs. All of these soared free across an open, unstructured ground.

The mood is consistently upbeat, belying the geopolitical upheavals of the day (German forces would enter and capture Paris in 1940). Kandinsky’s time in Paris was a period of great productivity, yielding 144 oil paintings and around 250 watercolours and gouaches in just over a decade. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944, at the age of 77.

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