Wassily Kandinsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Wassily Kandinsky stood in his studio one day and stared at a painting on the wall for a long moment before realising it was his own work, hanging upside down. That disorienting pause, according to some art historians, cracked something open in him. If the image could hold him with such force even when it made no recognisable sense, then perhaps the object in the painting did not need to be there at all. Perhaps colour alone could reach the soul.

  Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866, the son of a tea merchant. He studied law and economics, married, and taught at the University of Moscow before walking away from that career at the age of 30 to enroll in an art academy in Munich. From that late start he would become one of the most important figures in Western art, credited as a pioneer of abstraction and a theorist whose books reshaped how artists understood their own work.

  His life crossed the full upheaval of his era: two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Nazi Party, exile, and reinvention. His partnerships, his spiritual convictions, and his obsession with the relationship between colour and sound drove an art practice that never stood still. The painting hanging upside down was only the beginning of the question.

• 2. Moscow Roots

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  One of Kandinsky's great-grandmothers was Princess Gantimurova, a lineage that placed him at the edge of Russian nobility. He grew up in Moscow, where he studied law and economics at school, and he later recalled being fascinated and stirred by colour from his earliest years. That childhood sensitivity to colour never left him; it became the thread running through every phase of his art.

  At 23, in 1889, he joined an ethnographic research group travelling to the Vologda region north of Moscow. He described the experience in his memoir Looks on the Past: the houses and churches there were decorated with such shimmering colours that walking into them felt like stepping inside a painting. The folk art of the region, especially its use of bright colours against dark backgrounds, found its way into much of his early work.

  A few years later, he wrote what would become one of his most quoted analogies. Colour, he said, is the keyboard; the eyes are the harmony; and the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, causing vibrations in the soul. That metaphor, composed before he had yet made his name, laid out the entire logic of his later career.

• 3. The Munich Years

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  In 1896, before leaving Moscow, Kandinsky saw an exhibit of paintings by Monet. He was particularly drawn to a work in the Impressionist series of Haystacks, which the catalogue had to identify for him because he could not recognise the object. He later wrote about that confusion: the painting gripped him and impressed itself on his memory despite his inability to name what it depicted. Painting, he wrote, took on a fairy-tale power and splendour.

  That same year he enrolled at the Munich Academy, where his teachers eventually included Franz von Stuck. He was not admitted immediately and spent time learning on his own. At Anton Azbe's private school he found his footing, and it was during these years that he began to develop both as a painter and as an art theorist. He took formal notice of Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin, feeling it pushed the limits of music and melody beyond standard lyricism. He was also drawn to the theosophical ideas of Madame Blavatsky, whose theory that creation begins with a single point and descends through circles, triangles, and squares would echo through his later books.

  Illustrations by John Varley in the 1901 book Thought-Forms influenced him visually, and in 1908 he bought a copy of Thought-Forms by Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater. In 1909 he joined the Theosophical Society. These were not passing interests. His 1910 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art and his 1926 book Point and Line to Plane both drew directly on theosophical ideas about geometry and inner experience.

• 4. Gabriele Munter and the Blue Rider

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  In the summer of 1902, Kandinsky invited Gabriele Munter to join his summer painting classes in the Alps south of Munich. She accepted, and their relationship soon became personal as well as professional. They became engaged in the summer of 1903 while he was still married to his cousin Anja Chimiakina, whom he had wed after graduating in 1892. He and Munter travelled together through Europe, Russia, and North Africa until 1908, when they settled in the small Bavarian town of Murnau.

  Munter bought a summerhouse in Murnau in 1909, and the couple entertained colleagues there. The property is still known as Russenhaus. When the Nazi threat grew, she used the basement to hide many works by Kandinsky and others. Their relationship formally ended in 1916 in Stockholm, strained by mutual tension and his long failure to commit to marriage.

  Before that rupture, Kandinsky had helped found the Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen, the Munich New Artists' Association, becoming its president in 1909. When that group could not accommodate the radical direction he and others were pursuing, it dissolved in late 1911. He then formed The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) with August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch, and Munter. The group published an almanac and held two exhibitions. World War I ended all of it, sending Kandinsky back to Russia via Switzerland and Sweden. The first three of his ten large Compositions, now known only in black-and-white photographs that Munter took, were later confiscated by the Nazis in a raid on the Bauhaus and destroyed during World War II.

• 5. Theory in Sound and Colour

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  In 1909, Kandinsky attended a presentation by Aleksandra Unkovskaya at the Theosophical Congress in Budapest. She described a method for teaching music to children through colour, a system built on sound-to-colour synesthesia, the involuntary experience of colour and shape when hearing sound. Kandinsky quoted her directly: she had, he said, constructed a precise method of translating the colours of nature into music, of painting the sounds of nature, of seeing sounds. The encounter led him to formalise his own concept of a chain reaction between artist and viewer, which he expressed as: Emotion, sensation, the work of art, sensation, emotion.

  Hearing tones and chords as he painted, he built theories around specific correspondences: yellow was the colour of middle C on a brassy trumpet; black was the colour of closure and the end of things; combinations of colours produced vibrational frequencies akin to piano chords. He had learned to play the piano and cello at age 5, in 1871. Music ran through his thinking at every stage.

  His legendary stage design for a performance of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition put that synesthetic theory into three dimensions. The production premiered at a theatre in Dessau in 1928, and in 2015 the original designs were animated with modern video technology and synchronised with the music using Kandinsky's own preparatory notes and the director's script of Felix Klee. He also named his paintings in musical terms: the most spontaneous works he called improvisations, and the most elaborate he called compositions.

• 6. Bauhaus and the Geometric Turn

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  Kandinsky returned to Germany in 1920 after the Russian Revolution. His spiritual outlook had put him at odds with what he described as the argumentative materialism of Soviet society. In May 1922, he attended the International Congress of Progressive Artists and signed the Founding Proclamation of the Union of Progressive International Artists. That same year he joined the Bauhaus, where he taught the basic design course for beginners and an advanced theory course, ran painting classes, and led a workshop where he extended his colour theory with new ideas from form psychology.

  His research into forms, particularly points and lines, led to his second theoretical book, Point and Line to Plane, published in 1926. His work at the Bauhaus coincided with research by Gestalt psychologists, whose findings were also discussed there. Geometrical elements grew increasingly central to his painting: the circle, the half-circle, the angle, straight lines, and curves. He described the circle as the most peaceful shape and as a representation of the human soul.

  In 1923, he joined Die Blaue Vier, The Blue Four, a group formed with Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, and Alexej von Jawlensky at the instigation of Galka Scheyer, who promoted their work in the United States from 1924 onward. Right-wing pressure forced the Bauhaus to leave Weimar for Dessau in 1925. A Nazi campaign then drove the school from Dessau to Berlin in 1932, where it remained until its dissolution in July 1933. Kandinsky's 2-metre painting Yellow-red-blue (1925) from this period, with its vertical yellow rectangle, inclined red cross, and large dark blue circle, stands as one of the defining statements of his distance from constructivism and suprematism.

• 7. Paris and Final Works

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  After the Bauhaus closed, Kandinsky moved to France with his wife Nina, whom he had married on the 11th of February 1917 when she was 17 or 18 and he was 50. Their son Wsevolod, known as Lodya in the family, died in June 1920, and they had no more children. In Paris, Kandinsky worked in a living-room studio in his apartment. The paintings from this final decade show a new element: biomorphic forms with supple, non-geometric outlines, suggesting microscopic organisms. He occasionally mixed sand with paint to give his surfaces a granular, rustic texture, and he drew on Slavic popular art for colour combinations.

  In 1936 and again in 1939, he produced his final two major Compositions, the kind of large, elaborately developed canvases he had not made in years. Composition IX carries powerful diagonals with a central form that gives the impression of an embryo in the womb. Composition X places small squares and coloured bands against a black background like star fragments or filaments, with enigmatic hieroglyphs in pastel tones covering a large maroon mass that seems to float in the upper-left corner.

  Kandinsky became a French citizen in 1939. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine on the 13th of December 1944, the same night that a British air raid on the city of Braunschweig in Lower Saxony destroyed his Composition I (1910), a painting that had already survived years of displacement. The two losses, the man and one of his earliest large works, fell on the same night.

• 8. Legacy and Looted Art

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  Kandinsky's influence on Western art spread earlier than many realise. As early as 1912, On the Spiritual in Art was reviewed by Michael Sadleir in the London-based Art News. When Sadleir published an English translation in 1914, interest in Britain grew quickly. Extracts appeared that year in Percy Wyndham Lewis's periodical Blast and in Alfred Orage's weekly cultural newspaper The New Age. In 1910, Kandinsky had already participated in the Allied Artists' Exhibition organised by Frank Rutter at London's Royal Albert Hall, where the artist Spencer Frederick Gore singled out his work for praise.

  Sadleir's father, Michael Sadler, acquired several wood-prints and the abstract painting Fragment for Composition VII in 1913, following a visit to meet Kandinsky in Munich. Those works were displayed in Leeds, at the university or the Leeds Arts Club, between 1913 and 1923. On the art market, Kandinsky's Studie fur Improvisation 8, a 1909 painting of a man wielding a broadsword in a rainbow-hued village, sold at Christie's in 2012 for $23 million, having been on loan to the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland since 1960. Four years later, on the 16th of November 2016, Christie's sold Kandinsky's 1935 work Rigide et courbe for $23.3 million, a record for the artist. Solomon R. Guggenheim had purchased that painting directly from Kandinsky in 1936.

  The question of what happened to works during the Nazi era remains unresolved in some cases. In July 2001, Jen Lissitzky, son of artist El Lissitzky, filed a restitution claim against the Beyeler Foundation in Basel for Improvisation No. 10; a settlement was reached in 2002. The Lewenstein family's claim for Painting with Houses, held by the Stedelijk Museum, resulted in a Dutch court ruling the museum could retain the work, then, in August 2021, the Amsterdam City Council decided to return the painting to the Lewenstein family. A separate suit filed in 2017 against Bayerische Landesbank for the restitution of Das Bunte Leben remains part of the unfinished accounting of Kandinsky's scattered legacy.