1911
Woodcut (signed in print)
h12 x w18cm
Edition of 300

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was born in Moscow in 1866. After his parents divorced when he was 5 years old, he moved to Odessa to live with an aunt and began to learn to play the piano and cello at school, as well as study drawing. Even his childhood works reveal incredibly specific colour combinations, infused by his perception that ‘each colour lives by its mysterious life.’ Although he later wrote, ‘I remember that drawing and a little bit later painting lifted me out of the reality,’ he followed his family’s wishes to go into law, entering the University of Moscow in 1886. Having graduated with honours, Kandinsky began a fieldwork scholarship that entailed a visit to the Vologda province to study their traditional criminal jurisprudence and religion. The folk art there and the spiritual study seemed to stir latent longings, but in 1892, he took up a position on the Moscow Faculty of Law, managing an art-printing workshop on the side.

Two events precipitated an abrupt change of career in 1896. The first was seeing an exhibition of French Impressionists in Moscow in 1895, especially Claude Monet’s Haystacks at Giverny, which was his first experience of nonrepresentational art; and the other was hearing Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Bolshoi Theatre. Kandinsky chose to abandon his law career and move to Munich to devote himself full-time to the study of art.

In Munich, Kandinsky was initially accepted into a prestigious private painting school, and then moved on to the Munich Academy of Arts, but much of his study was self-directed. He began with conventional themes and art forms, but all the while he was forming theories derived from his spiritual study and his understanding of the intense relationship between music and colour, which influenced his work formally through the first decade of the 20th century and eventually led to his ultimate status as the father of abstract art.

Colour became more an expression of emotion rather than a faithful description of nature or subject matter in Kandinsky’s work. He formed friendships and working relationships with other painters of the time, such as Paul Klee, and frequently exhibited, taught, and published his ideas on art theory.

Kandinsky met the art student Gabriele Münter in 1903, and moved in with her before his divorce from his wife was finalised in 1911. They travelled extensively, settling in Bavaria before the outbreak of World War I. He had already formed the New Artists Association in Munich; the Blue Rider group was founded with fellow artist Franz Marc, and he was a member of the Bauhaus movement alongside Klee and the composer Arnold Schoenberg.

The First World War took Kandinsky back to Russia, where he was influenced by the Constructivist movement, whose work was based on hard lines, dots and geometry. Whilst there, the 50-year-old Kandinsky met the decades-younger Nina Andreevskaya, the daughter of a general in the Russian army. They married and had a son together, but the boy lived for only three years and thereafter the subject of children became a painful one. The couple stayed on in Russia after the revolution, with Kandinsky applying his restless and comprehensive energies to the administration of educational and government-run art programs, helping to create Moscow’s Institute of Artistic Culture and Museum of Pictorial Culture.

Back in Germany after clashing theoretically with other artists, Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus school in Berlin and wrote plays and poems. In 1933, when the Nazis seized power, the Bauhaus school was shut down and Kandinsky moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine in France, where the artist died in 1944.

Kandinsky believed that each time period puts its own indelible stamp on artistic expression, and his vivid interpretations of colour through musical and spiritual sensibilities certainly altered the artistic landscape at the start of the 20th century, altering the trajectory of modern art. Today, his work can be found in collections across the world, including the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.