Short answers, pulled from the story.
Wassily Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in Western art. He was also an influential art theorist whose books Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910) and Point and Line to Plane (1926) reshaped how artists understood colour, form, and the relationship between painting and music.
Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866, the son of Lidia Ticheeva and Vassily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, a tea merchant. One of his great-grandmothers was Princess Gantimurova.
The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) was an artist group Kandinsky formed in late 1911 after the Munich New Artists' Association dissolved. Members included August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch, and Gabriele Munter. The group published an almanac and held two exhibitions before World War I ended the project in 1914.
Kandinsky taught the basic design class for beginners and a course on advanced theory at the Bauhaus from 1922 until the Nazis closed the school in 1933. He also conducted painting classes and led a workshop where he combined colour theory with form psychology.
A Nazi raid on the Bauhaus in the 1930s led to the confiscation of Kandinsky's first three Compositions, all of which were destroyed during World War II. His Composition I (1910) was destroyed in a British air raid on Braunschweig on the night of the 13th of December 1944, the same night Kandinsky himself died.
On the 16th of November 2016, Christie's auctioned Kandinsky's 1935 painting Rigide et courbe for $23.3 million, setting a record for the artist. Solomon R. Guggenheim had originally purchased the painting directly from Kandinsky in 1936.