Russian painter, writer, and art theorist, one of the principal founders of abstract art. Before Wassily Kandinsky's first pathbreaking composition from 1910, several artists had already produced non-objective paintings. Among them was the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, whose most important works were created in 1906 under the influence of Spiritualism and Theosophy. Kandinsky's Über des Geistige in der Kunst (1912, On the Spiritual in Art) is a fundamental text of the theory behind abstract art.

"Every work of art is a child of its time, while often it is the parent of our emotions." (from On the Spiritual in Art, edited by Hilla Rebay, 1946, p. 9)

Vasili (Wassily) Vasilievoch Kandinsky was born in Moscow into an upper middle-class family. His father, Vasili Silverstrovich, was a tea merchant. He came from Kyakhta, a Siberian town near the Chinese border. Kandinsky's great grandmother was a Mongolian aristocrat. Lidia Ivanovna Tikheeva, Kandinsky's mother, was from Moscow.

Kandinsky spent his childhood in Moscow and Odessa, where the family moved in 1871. After his parents divorced, he stayed with his father. Kandinsky's aunt, Elisabeth Tikheeva, took also care of him. As a child Kandinsky spoke a great deal of German – his maternal grandmother was a German. Fairy tales formed a part of his upbringing and in his early paintings Kandinsky often returned to their colorful world. In Odessa, Kandinsky started to take music lesson, learning to play the piano and the sello. Kandinsky never felt at home in the southern town, and his father used to take him to Moscow every summer.

In 1886 Kandinsky began to study at the University of Moscow economics and law, but also ethnographic studies, especially the Finno-Ugric people, interested him. Kandinsky's own name had possibly Finno-Ugric origins – the Ostiak word "kondinskii" or "kondar" means strong and powerful; the Finnish word for "konda" is "honka" (pine). In 1888 Kandinsky delivered a lecture on the beliefs of the Perms and Zyrians, which earned him a field work scholarship.

Commissioned by the Society for Natural Science, Ethnography and Anthropology, Kandinsky traveled with a copy of the Finnish national epic, Kalevala, to the northern province of Vologda to study the traditional criminal jurisprudence and the religion of the Zyrians. During the journey Kandinsky kept a diary. "I read the Kalevala. I worship it," Kandinsky wrote. Later he recalled in his autobiography, Rückblicke (1913), that in Vologda he first learned to look at picture not only from the outside but to enter into it, to move around in it and to take part in its life. Inspired by folk art, Kandinsky published a report on pagan relics of Finno-Ugric tribes, entitled 'From Material on the Ethnography of the Sysolsk and Vychegodsk Zyriane'. His drawing and water-color sketches from the journey Kandinsky donated to the Rumyantsev Museum.

In 1892 Kandinsky married his cousin Anja Chimiakin, with whom he lived until 1904. After completing his dissertation, On the Legality of Laborers' Wages, Kandinsky was appointed to the Department of Law at the University of Moscow. At the age of thirty, he left a promising career in  law to follow his passion for art –  "the thought overcame me: now or never. My gradual inner development, of which until now I had been unconscious, had progressed so far that I could sense my artistic powers with complete clarity while inwardly I was sufficiently mature to relize with equal clarity that I had every right to be a painter." (Legal Food for Thought: A Savory Stew of Stimulating Essays Laced with Law by Daniel Kornstein, 2023, pp. 136-137) For a time he worked as the artistic director of the Kušverev printing plant, and then went to Munich, the major center of Russian art students, to study painting. The city was "a nursery of the arts which influenced Moscow," recalled the painter K.S. Petrov-Vodkin. (Artists in Revolution: Portraits of the Russian Avant-garde, 1905-1925 by Robert C. Williams, 1978, p. 61) Kandinsky entered a private art school and after failing the entrance examination to the Munich Academy of Art, he continued to study privately. Finally in 1900 Kandinsky was admitted to the Academy, where his teacher was Franz von Stuck.

In 1901 Kandinsky co-founded the short-lived artists' association Phalanx, which closed after two years. With his students Kandinsky planned to visit Bavarian churches, arguing that visiting churches in Moscow during his youth was very profitable for him. The purpose of the association was to organize exhibitions informing the public about "the art of tomorrow". Akseli Gallen-Kallela, the internationally renowned national-romantic artist, whom Kandinsky greatly admired, was also invited to take part in the Phalanx exhibition of 1902. Many of the works were based on the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic.

At that time Kandinsky painted naturalistic lanscapes, legends and scenes from medieval Russian life. Inspired by lubki (woodblock prints), Kandinsky produced Stihi bez slov (1903, Poems Without Words), an album of woodcuts based on the life in old Moscow. His first noteworthy piece of art writing, a critique of critics, Kandinsky published in 1901 in a Moscow newspaper. From Germany he sent articles for the progressive art journal Mir Iskusstva in St. Petersburg, the art capital of Russia at that time. For the Russian journal Apollon, the successor of Mir Iskusstva, he contributed letters from Munich. Kandinsky did not think much of contemporary German art and prophesied that something is going to happen.

In 1904 Kandinsky separated from his wife; their divorce was legalized in 1911. With Gabriele Münter, his student at Phalanx art school, Kandinsky traveled in Europe and Africa. Münter was 11 years his junior. In 1909 she bought a house in Murnau, ca. 50 km from Munich. Kandinsky and Münter spent there their summers until the outbreak of WW I.

Throughout the years, Kandinsky sought his personal way of expression. His long-time interest in the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk prompted him to create the stage composition The Yellow Sound (formerly entitled The Giants). From 1904 Kandinsky exhibited regularly at the Salo d'Autonomne in Paris. In 1909 he co-founded the Neue Künstler Vereinigung (NKV). The important daily Müncher Neueste Nachrichten accused most of the members being "incurable madmen" or "shameless charlatans". NKV staged two exhibitions – Kandinsky himself broke with the group when it refused one of his paintings, 'Composition V', because it was too abstract.

"Of all types of modern painting," said Herbert Read, "Kandinsky's comes nearest to a plastic equivalent for music." (The Meaning of Art by Herbert Read, 1972, pp. 229-230) From childhood, Kandinsky had been very sensitive to colour. He had synaesthesia as well; he became aware of this gift as a student, when he attended a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin. Kandinsky associated colours with music; he heard music when he painted. "I could see all my colours; I realized that painting possesses the same power as music." (Painting in the Twentieth Century: Volume One by Werner Haftmann, p. 137) Kandinsky's Impression III was inspited by Arnold Schönberg's atonal music."If visual abstraction and musical dissonance were precisely equivalent, Impression III and the third of the Five Pieces for Orchestra would present the same degree of difficulty." (The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross, 2008, p. 61)

Between 1910 and 1914 Kandinsky created a series of abstract paintins, variously entitled impressions, improvisations, and compositions. At the second exhibition of NKV Kandinsky showed 'Composition II' (1910) and 'Improvisation X' (1910). He also produced 'First Abstract Watercolor', although according to some sources it was actually a study for 'Composition VII' (1913), which has been incorrectly dated. Some ambiguity exists about the chronology of this work, but Kandinsky himself always asserted that he was the first to paint a nonobjective painting.

With Franz Marc, Münter, August Macke and other artists, Kandinsky formed a group, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), which promoted the spiritual and abstaraction in art. As Charles W. Leadbeater in Man Visible and Invisible (1902), Kandinsky assigned special emotional qualities to colours. "Blue is the typical heavenly colour," Kandinsky argued."When it sinks into black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human. . . . . Absolute green, which is the most restful colour in existence, moves in no direction, has no corresponding appeal, such as joy, sorrow, or passion, demands nothing." (On the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandisnky, edited by Hilla Rebay, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946, pp. 64-65) Kandinsky thought that light blue is like the sound of a flute.

Der Blaue Reiter publisher in 1912 an almanach, which had a shamanistic theme. Its cover desing by Kandinsky portrayed a horseman, one of his favorite images. The model of the horn-blowing rider was perhaps derived from Gallen-Kallela's sketch for the fresco 'Kullervo Goes to War' (1901). In addition to illustrations of ethnic objects, the almanach included articles written by artists, and manuscripts of music by Arnold Schönberg and Anton von Webern. Kandinsky contributed an essay, 'On the Problem of Form', a drama entitled Der Gelbe Klang, and a study of the modern stage and Wagner. In 1911 he attended a concert of Schönberg's music. Captured by the composer's theories he translated into Russian Schönberg's article 'On Octaves and Fifths', part of his Harmonielehre. In addition, he contributed an article on Schönberg to a publication dedicated to the composer.

Klänge (Sounds), Kandinsky's "musical" publication from 1912, contained prose poems and woodcuts. The edition, dedicated to the artist's parents, was limited to 345 copies. Four of its poems were published in Russia in Mayakovsky's futurist anthology A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1912), without Kandinsky's permission. In a letter to Russkow Slovo he protested: "I have the greatest sympathy for all honest and creative experiments . . .  Under no circumstances, however, do I go along the tone in which the prospect is written and I categorically condemn this tone, whoever the author may be." (Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe by Walter L. Adamson, 2007, p. 162)

Of crucial importance to the emergence of abstract art were discoveries in the field of atomic research, trends developing in cubism, Freud's theories, reaction against materialism, and the general rebellion against conventions in art, literature, and so on. From the beginning, Kandinsky's vision was closely associated with mysticism, with a spiritual point of view. Almost every Expressionist painter shared a similar insight into the world. Emil Nolde wrote in his autobiography, Das eigene Leben (1931) that "for me, the highest value, the form of visible life, was always inward and spiritual". (Expressionism by Roger Cardinal, 1984, p. 70)

Kandinsky was fascinated by the occult teachings of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, and the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner, whose lectures he attended. Steiner argued that the "soul-and-spiritual" reality is accessible to the "seer". Kandinsky owned a copy of his Theosophie (1904) and a number of books on Spiritualism. Also Worringer's dissertation Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908) had a profound impact on the artist. "Our investigations proceed from the presupposition that the work of art, as an autonomous organism, stands beside nature on equal terms, and in its deepest and innermost essence, devoid of any connection with it, in so far as by nature is understood the visible surface of things. Natural beauty is on no account to be regarded as a condition of the work of art." (Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to th Psychology of Style by Wilhelm Worringer, translated by Michael Bullock, 1953, p. 3)

Kandinsky completed Über des Geistige in der Kunst in 1911, but it was not easy for him to find a publisher for his book. Thanks to Franz Marc, it was accepted by Piper Verlang in Munchen – the same house that had published Worringer's dissertation. Prior to its publication in 1912, the manuscript was read and discussed at the All-Russian Congress of Artists in St. Petersburg in December 1911. An English translation appeared in 1914 in London.

According to Kandinsky, materialism "has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game . . . The awakening soul, while trying to free itself, is still under its domination." (On the Spiritual in Art, p. 10) Kandinsky rejected the possibility of merely aesthetic approach to art: "There is no form, or anything in the world which says nothing." (Ibid., p. 47) He was less concerned about the motif of the painting than the use of color and line as means of representing "spiritual" states of mind. It can be said, that abstract painting in Kandinsky's art theory conveys a spiritual message, like an Orthodox icon.

Before producing his first abstract watercolor in 1910, Kandinsky had already started to think that the subject matter was detrimental to his paintings. As a student the nearsighted artist had seen Monet's 'Haystack in the Sun' in an Impressionistic exhibition without being able to recognize its motif. This experience occurred again in Munich, where Kandinsky was unexpectedly bewitched by his own painting, lying on its side. Kandinsky said he could see nothing but shapes and colors and the content of which was incomprehensible to him.

From late 1914 to 1921 Kandinsky lived in Russia, except for the periods he went to Finland, still part of Russia, and Sweden, where his works were exhibited in Gummesons Konsthandel, Stockholm. Discoveries in quantum mechanics, which had shown that matter has no purely objective reality, led him to write: "The collapse of the atom model was equivalent, in my soul, to the collapse of the whole world. Suddenly the thickest walls fell. I would not have been amazed if a stone appeared before my eye in the air, melted, and became invisible." (Warped Passages: Unravelling the Universe's Hidden Dimensions by Lisa Randall, 2006, p. 117)

In Moscow Kandinsky fell in love with Nina von Andreyevski, the 24-year-old daughter of General von Andreyevski. His first gift to his young fiancée was an abstract watercolor. The couple married in 1917 and honeymooned in Imatra, a small city in Finland famous for its rapids. A work from this journey portrays two women, separated by a mountain and rapids. The Imatra State Hotel, much magnified and dramatized, is on top of the mountain. The composition has some similarities with earlier works, such as 'Glass Painting with a Sun' (1910) and 'Small Pleasures' (1913).

Kandinsky was very active in organizing artistic life in Russia. He became a member of the Visual Arts Section in the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment (NARKOMPROS), and produced plans for a network of contemporary art museums. He was also appointed professor at the Free State Art Studios. In 1921 he created the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences with the help of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet commissar of education. Among his associates were Rodchenko, Stepanova, and other members of the Russian avant-garde. His pedagogical activity later formed the basis for his work at the Bauhaus. Although working with Bolsheviks, Kandinsky never denounced his Russian-Orthodox faith – on the contrary. Several of his paintings from the early 1910s deal with religious subjets, saints, the Deluge, and the Resurrection.

Frustrated with tightening political control and Alexander Rodchenko's utilitarianism, Kandinsky left Moscow for Berlin in December 1921 – he was among the earliest of emigrants. It was still the time, when Bolsheviks were characterized as "Nietzschean free spirits" (Max Eastman) and avant-garde artists (not all) fused innovartion and revolution. There were no gulags,

Kandinsky became a professor at the Bauhaus, a new art school created by Walter Gropius. In 1922 he took over the mural-painting workshop and a course on color, in which he followed mostly Goethe's theory of colour, Zur Farbenlehre (1810). Kandinsky also gave courses in 'Analytical Drawing' and 'Abstract Form Elements' for first-semester students and free painting classes from 1927. Paul Klee, his colleague and friend at the Bauhaus, experimented with geometric abstraction, and wrote during this period his Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925).

Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (1926, Point and Line to Plane), which is considered one of the most influential books in 20th-century art, contained a portion of Kandinsky's course material. The point is, according to Kandinsky, the basic or the proto-element of painting: "The point is the innermost concise form." (Point and Line to Plane, translated by Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay, 1979, p. 32) Its antithesis is the line. The point means rest, the line "represents the most concise form of the potentiality for endless movement." (Ibid., p. 57) The curved line carries within it "a seed of the plane." The boundary between the line and the plane is theoretically separable but these pictorial elements actually merge with each other. "Even the straight line . . . carries within it with its other characteristics the desire (even though deeply hidden) to give birth to a plane; to transform itself into a more compact, more self-contained thing." (Ibid., p. 82)

Until 1931, Kandinsky co-edited Bauhaus Zeitschrift für Gestaltungen. Poems by Kandinsky appeared in the literary journal Transition, based in New York. In 1933, when the Nazis seized power, storm troopers invaded the school in Berlin, and the Bauhaus was closed down for good. Most of the faculty and many students left Germany. Works by modern artists, Kandinsky included (two paintings and twelve works on paper), were exhibited in July 1937 in the infamous 'Entartete Kunst' (Degenerate Art) Exhibition in the Hofgarted Arcades in Munich. More than million people visited the exhibition, which traveled to may others cities in Germany and Austria. Fifty-seven works by Kandinsky in German museums were confiscated by the Nazis.

Kandinsky moved to France, where he settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, in a little apartment found for him and his wife by Marcel Duchamp. After the Germans invaded France in 1940, Kandinsky spent two months in the Pyrenees, and then returned to Neuilly. The American Embassy urged him to move to the United States. Kandinsky continued to exhibit frequently; in 1943 he had three exhibitions in New York. Kandinsky's last work was L'Elan tempéré' (Moderate Impulse), in which one can discover perhaps an equine form in movement. Kandinsky died in Neuilly of cerebro-vascular disease on 13 December, 1944.

For further reading: Kandinsky by Hugo Zehder (1920); Kandinsky by Will Grohmann (1924); Kandinsky by Marcel Avland (1947); Wassily Kandinsky, ed. by Max Bill (1951); Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work by Will Grohmann (1958); Kandinsky by Marcel Brion (1961); Kandinsky by Cornelius Doelman (1964); Kandinsky. The Language of the Eye by Paul Overy (1969); The Sounding Cosmos by Sixten Ringbom (1970); Kandinsky by Arturo Bovi (1971); The Blue Rider by Peter Vergo (1977); Kandinsky by Hans K. Roetel and Jean K. Benjamin (1979); The Blue Rider by Paul Vogt (1980); Kandinsky by Thomas Messer (1997); Kandinsky, ed. by Natalia Avtonomova et al. (1998); Wassily Kandinsky, 1866-1944: The Journey to Abstraction by Ulrike Becks-Malorny (1999); Modernism and Masculinity: Mann, Wedekind, Kandinsky through World War I by Gerald Izenberg (2000); Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, ed. by Annegret Hoberg (2001); Klee and Kandinsky: Neighbors, Friends, Rivals by Vivian Endicott Barnett, et al. (2015); Kandinsky: The Elements of Art by Philippe Sers  (2016); Vasilii Kandinskii by Aleksandr IAkimovich (2019); Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle, edited by Tracey Bashkoff and Megan Fontanella (2021); Kandinsky: Incarnating Beauty by Alexandre Kojève (2022); Art, Music, and Mysticism at the Fin-de-siècle: Seeing and Hearing the Beyond, edited by Corrinne Chong and Michelle Foot (2024); Expressionists: Kandinsky, Munter and the Blue Rider by Natalia Sidlina (2024)

Selected works:

• Stihi bez slov, 1903
• Xylographies, 1909
• Buhnenkomposition 3 (Schwartz und Weiss), 1911
• Über des Geistige in der Kunst, 1912 - The Art of Spiritual Harmony (tr. with an introduction by M. T. H. Sadleir, 1914) / On the Spiritual in Art (ed. by Hilla Rebay, 1946) / Concerning the Spiritual in Art (edited by Adrian Glew; translated by Michael Sadler, 2006)
• 'Über Kunstverstehen', in Der Sturm, 1912
• Der Blaue Reiter Almanach, 1912 (ed. by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc) [The Blaue Reiter Almanach]
• Klänge, 1912 - Sounds (translated and with an introduction by Elizabeth R. Napier, 2nd edition 2019)
• Der Blaue Reiter, 1912 (herausgeber: Kandinsky und Franz Marc)
  
• Sturm Album, 1913 (includes Rückblicke)
• Om Konstnären, 1916
• Tekst Khudozhnika. Stupeni, 1918
• Institut khudozhestvennoi kultury v Moskve, 1920
• Kleine Welten, 2022
  
• Punkt und Linie zur Fläche, 1926 - Point and Line to Plane (edited by Hilla Rebay; translsted by Howard Dearstine and Hilla Rebay, 1947)
• Anvers: Editions Selection, 1933
• Gouaches, aquarelles, dessins, 1947
  
• Zehn Farbenlichtdrucke nach Aquarellen und Gouachen, 1949 (ausgewählt und eingeleitet von Max Bill)
• Kandinsky, 1950 (introd. et commentaires de Charles Estienne)
• Wassily Kandinsky, 1951
  
• Kandinsky; œuvre gravé, 1954 (texte par Will Grohmann)
• Rückblick. Mit einer Einleitung von Ludwig Grote, 1955
  
• Essay über Kunst und Künstler, 1955 (ed. by Max Bill)
• Kandinsky (1866-1944), 1959 (with an introd. and notes by Herbert Read)
  
• Kandinsky, 1866-1944, 1960 (text by Will Grohmann)
  
• Watercolors, Drawings, Writings, 1961 (with an essay by Jean Cassou; translated by Norbert Guterman)
  
• Sturm Album, 1964 (in Modern Artist on Art, ed. by Robert L. Herbert)
• Kandinsky, the Bauhaus years: April-May 1966, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery ... New York, Marlborough Fine Art ... London, Marlborough Galleria d'Arte ... Rome, 1966
• O dukhovnom v iskusstve. Vasiliĭ Kandinskiĭ, 1967 (Predisl. Niny Kandinskoĭ; Perevod Andreia Lisovskogo)
  
• Regards sur le passé et autres textes 1912-1922, 1974 (ed. by Jean Paul Bouillon)
• Ecrits complets, 1970-75 (2 vols.)
• 'Plan for the Physiopsychological Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1923', in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde-Theory and Criticism, 1902-1924, 1976 (ed. by John E. Bowlt)
• Briefe, Bilder, und Dokumente einer aussergewöhnlichen Begegnung, 1980 (with A. Schönberg) [Letters, Pictures, and Documents]
• Die Gesammelte Schriften, 1980- (ed. by Hans K. Roethel and Jelena Hahl-Koch)
• Complete Writings on Art, 1982
• Kandinsky, Franz Marc: Briefwechsel, 1983 (ed.by Klaus Lankheit)
• Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter. Letters and reminiscences, 1902-1914, 1994 (ed. by Annegret Hoberg)
• Briefe - Texte - Schriften aus der Zeit am Bauhaus, 2016 (herausgegeben und kommentiert von Alexander Graeff)
  
• O dukhovnom v iskusstve, 2017
  
• Kandinsky: das Leben in Briefen, 1889-1944, 2023 (herausgegeben von Jelena Hahl-Fontaine)