Abstraction and the avant-garde
Kandinsky is one of the artists who quite literally changed the alphabet of art. For him, point, line, circle, and color possessed their own emotional and spiritual energy.
His theory and practice made abstraction not a random experiment, but a full philosophy of twentieth-century art.
Creator story
Kandinsky came to painting only around the age of thirty. He took a law degree at Moscow University and lectured in law, and only in 1896 turned down an academic career to leave for Munich and study painting. One jolt he named was Monet's Haystacks in Moscow: a canvas whose subject he simply could not make out.
Source: Wikipedia / Wikimedia
Key works
These works make it easiest to see how the artist changed form, content, and the very way art could exist in culture.
1923
The music of form, color, and mathematical rhythm.
1926
A cosmic model of abstraction.
1925
Color as autonomous energy.
FAQ
Quick answers to what people most often search about this artist.
Wassily Kandinsky lived from 1866 to 1944. He was born in Moscow and died at Neuilly-sur-Seine outside Paris, spending most of his working life in Germany and France as a painter and art theorist.
He was one of the founders of abstract art and its leading theorist. Kandinsky showed that painting could work without a recognizable subject, and argued the case in his 1911 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
Most often it is Composition VIII (1923), where circles, triangles and sharp lines replace the visible world entirely. It was painted during his Bauhaus years and is held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
He consistently described color as sound: in Concerning the Spiritual in Art light blue is likened to a flute, darker blue to a cello, and the deepest blue to an organ. That musical logic became the basis of his abstraction.
