Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was born in Moscow on December 4, 1866, into a prosperous merchant family. His father, Vasily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, was a tea trader whose business took the family to Odessa in 1871, and it was there that the boy grew up, learning piano and cello alongside his school lessons ^[1]. After his parents separated, an aunt, Elizaveta Tikheeva, took a large part in raising him, and he later recalled childhood experiences of color with unusual intensity, describing specific hues he associated with early memories ^[2].

Nothing in his first career suggested a painter. Kandinsky enrolled at the University of Moscow in 1886 to read law and economics, and he proved a capable scholar. In 1889 the university sent him on an ethnographic expedition to the Vologda region in the Russian north, where the painted interiors of peasant houses left a lasting mark on him: he wrote later of feeling that he had stepped inside a picture ^[2]. He completed his degree, married his cousin Anna Chimyakina in 1892, and by 1893 was teaching law at the university.

Two experiences in 1896 changed his direction. He saw one of Claude Monet's Haystacks paintings at an exhibition of French art in Moscow and was struck that the subject was almost unreadable while the color held all the power. Around the same time a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin at the Bolshoi convinced him that painting could aspire to the condition of music ^[1]. That year he declined a professorship at the University of Dorpat, gave up law at the age of thirty, and moved to Munich to train as a painter ^[3].

Munich in the late 1890s was one of the liveliest art centers in Europe, and Kandinsky worked his way through its institutions with the discipline of a former academic. He studied at the private school of Anton Azbe from 1896, then in 1900 entered the Munich Academy under Franz von Stuck, whose other students included Paul Klee ^[3]. In 1901 he co-founded the exhibiting society Phalanx and opened an art school attached to it, where he met the painter Gabriele Münter, a student who became his companion for more than a decade ^[1].

His early paintings drew on Russian folklore, fairy tale imagery, and the bright palette of the Jugendstil movement. Between 1903 and 1908 he and Münter traveled widely, painting in Tunisia, Italy, the Netherlands, and Paris, where he absorbed the color experiments of the Fauves ^[3]. In 1908 the couple settled partly in Murnau, a small town in the Bavarian Alps, and the landscapes Kandinsky painted there grew steadily flatter, hotter in color, and less tied to description.

Between roughly 1910 and 1913 he pushed those Murnau experiments past the point where recognizable subject matter survived. Works from this period, which he grouped under the musical titles Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions, are among the earliest fully abstract paintings in Western art, and a watercolor sometimes dated to 1910 has often been cited, with scholarly debate, as the first ^[2]. In 1911 he and Franz Marc broke away from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München to found Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an informal group that exhibited work by Marc, Klee, August Macke, and others and published an influential almanac in 1912 ^[4].

Any account of Wassily Kandinsky achievements has to begin with the leap into abstraction itself. Paintings such as Composition VII of 1913, a churning canvas over three meters wide now in the Tretyakov Gallery, demonstrated that color, line, and form could carry meaning without depicting anything at all ^[5]. He did not arrive there by accident. He kept notebooks, made dozens of preparatory studies, and argued in print that abstraction answered a spiritual crisis in materialist Europe.

His theoretical writing was as consequential as his painting. Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in Munich in December 1911, argued that colors and forms act directly on the soul the way musical tones do, and it introduced his idea of the "inner necessity" that should govern an artist's choices ^[4]. The book went through multiple editions within a year and was read across Europe. A second major treatise, Point and Line to Plane, followed in 1926 as a Bauhaus book, setting out a near systematic grammar of pictorial elements ^[6].

Kandinsky was also an institution builder. After returning to Russia during the First World War he helped reorganize Soviet museums and taught at state art workshops in Moscow, though his spiritual view of art soon clashed with the constructivists' utilitarian program ^[3]. From 1922 to 1933 he taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin, running the wall painting workshop and later a free painting class, and his Bauhaus period produced the cooler, geometric canvases, circles, grids, and precise arcs, for which he is equally known, among them Composition VIII of 1923, now in the Guggenheim Museum in New York ^[6].

Kandinsky's private life divided into three long chapters. His first marriage, to his cousin Anna Chimyakina in 1892, effectively ended when he left Moscow for Munich, though the divorce came only in 1911 ^[3]. From 1902 he lived and worked with Gabriele Münter, herself a significant painter of the Blaue Reiter circle. When the war forced him to leave Germany in 1914 as an enemy alien, Münter remained behind with a large body of his early work, which she hid from the Nazis for decades and donated to the city of Munich in 1957, the core of the Lenbachhaus collection ^[1].

Back in Moscow, Kandinsky met Nina Andreevskaya, the young daughter of a Russian general, and married her in February 1917, months before the October Revolution. Their only child, a son named Vsevolod, was born later that year and died in 1920, a loss the couple rarely discussed ^[3]. Nina remained his wife, manager, and fierce guardian of his reputation until his death, and after 1944 she worked to place his paintings in major museums before her own death in 1980.

Those who knew Kandinsky often remarked on the contrast between the wildness of his canvases and the correctness of the man. He dressed formally, kept regular working hours, and spoke with the precision of the lawyer he had trained to be. He also reported experiencing synesthesia, perceiving colors when he heard music, and he framed much of his theory around such cross-sensory correspondences, though historians debate how literally to take his descriptions ^[2].

The Nazi seizure of power ended the Bauhaus. The school, which had moved to Berlin as a private institution, closed under political pressure in July 1933, and at the end of that year Kandinsky and Nina left Germany for France ^[3]. They settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb west of Paris, in a small apartment overlooking the Seine, and he became a French citizen in 1939.

The Paris years brought hardship and a final stylistic turn. The German government confiscated his works from public collections and included several in the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, which mocked modernist painting before enormous crowds ^[5]. In France, where the art world still favored Picasso and surrealism, his work sold slowly and materials grew scarce during the occupation. Yet the late paintings, filled with small biomorphic shapes that suggest embryos, insects, and marine creatures floating on soft grounds, opened yet another vocabulary, visible in works such as Composition IX of 1936 and Sky Blue of 1940 ^[7].

Kandinsky kept painting into his final year, working on small boards when canvas ran out. He died at home in Neuilly-sur-Seine on December 13, 1944, nine days after his seventy-eighth birthday and months after the liberation of Paris, and was buried in the town's new cemetery ^[1].

Few modern artists left a deeper imprint. Kandinsky's demonstration that painting could dispense with subject matter altogether opened the road taken by generations of abstract artists, from his Bauhaus colleagues to the American painters of the 1940s and 1950s. Solomon R. Guggenheim began collecting his work in 1929 on the advice of Hilla Rebay, and the museum Guggenheim founded in New York now holds one of the largest Kandinsky collections in the world ^[5]. The Centre Pompidou in Paris received a major bequest from Nina Kandinsky, and the Lenbachhaus in Munich preserves the early work saved by Münter ^[7].

His books have proved as durable as his paintings. Concerning the Spiritual in Art remains in print more than a century after publication and is standard reading in art schools, while Point and Line to Plane still informs teaching on design and composition ^[4]. Art historians continue to argue over precedence in abstraction, weighing his claims against those of Hilma af Klint, Frantisek Kupka, and others, and that debate itself measures how central his example became ^[2].

The market and the public have followed. His 1913 canvas Painting with White Lines sold at Sotheby's in London in 2017 for 33 million pounds, then a record for the artist at auction ^[8]. Among the enduring Wassily Kandinsky facts is a simple one: a Moscow law lecturer who did not commit to painting until thirty ended his life having changed what a painting could be, and any serious Wassily Kandinsky biography is also a history of how abstraction entered modern art.