Vasily Kandinsky

Vasily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866. According to the Guggenheim Museums and Foundation, he studied law and economics at the University of Moscow before deciding to pursue art. He studied in Munich from the late 1890s and developed a career that moved between Russia, Germany and France.

Kandinsky became a major participant in the early twentieth-century movement toward abstraction. The Museum of Modern Art describes his 1911 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art as an argument for abstraction and links his painting Komposition V to a new kind of picture. Kandinsky and Franz Marc helped form the Blaue Reiter artistic circle in Munich; Kandinsky's work increasingly used color and line for expressive rather than purely descriptive purposes.

Kandinsky joined the Bauhaus faculty in 1922, teaching in Weimar and later Dessau. MoMA notes that he made color theory an important part of the curriculum. After the Nazi government closed the Bauhaus in 1933, he settled in France. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944. His career and writings remain influential in discussions of modern abstract art.