Russian artist, an expressionist painter, who in the years immediately preceding World War I, completed an amazing transformation of art in a crucial period of 20th century culture, and made abstraction itself the subject of the painting. A Russian-born mystic, trained as a lawyer, he helped lay the foundations for abstract art in Munich before World War I and was the most influential painter in early Modernism.
Born into a comfortable situation as the son of a successful tea merchant, Kandinsky was a Russian aristocrat with perhaps Mongol ancestors. He was a serious student of economics and ethnography, and a graduate from law school at the University of Moscow. He reached a turning point, however, at age 30, and decided to return to and embrace his first love, art. He left for Munich in 1896, a neophyte painter. He opened his own art school in 1904 and traveled in 1906. He wrote on the spiritual in art in 1910. By the time he left Munich for Moscow in 1914, Kandinsky was one of the great masters of his time. He taught there at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts. But Russia had changed, and Kandinsky left again seven years later.
With a strong interest in spiritualism, he was acquainted with the writings of Madame Blavatsky. In 1908 he heard theosophist Rudolph Steiner lecture in Berlin. Three years later he painted his first abstract oil, and published his epochal book “On the Spiritual in Art.” In his prophetic book, “The Art of Spiritual Harmony,” 1912, he wrote that, “The salvation of art and of man is a spiritual one. One does not have to paint Madonna’s to be a religious painter.” His vision of art was “something that appeals less to the eye and more to the soul.”
The great painter returned to Berlin on Christmas Eve 1921 and began a teaching job the following year. He spent 11 years as a master at the Bauhaus, the most influential art academy of the 20th century. His outwardly conventional, non-Bohemian existence contrasted strongly with the profound romanticism of his imaginative life.
In 1929, the Baroness Hilla Rebay, an artist-turned art adviser, brought American millionaire Solomon Guggenheim to visit Kandinsky’s studio in Dessau. Guggenheim and Rebay purchased large numbers of Kandinsky’s paintings. In 1939, when they opened their Museum of Non-Objective Art in New York, Kandinsky’s work was its heart.
In his memoirs, Kandinsky described the actual moment of the accidental discovery of abstract art. He was 44 years old, coming home at sunset from a session out doors, 1910. Still absorbed in his work, he entered his studio and was struck immediately by an “indescribably beautiful painting, all irradiated by an interior light.” He distinguished only forms and colors, no meaning, in the canvas. Then he realized it was one of his own paintings, turned on its side. He knew then that “objects” were harming the painting. His development began in rationalism and culminated when he fully embraced intuition. He had what was viewed as a musical approach to the visual world: he believed that music is the highest art, and that to be creative, one must learn the methods of music to apply to that medium. His venture into poetry and the dramatic arts led him to write five plays, none of which were staged during his lifetime.
Kandinsky’s first marriage, to a cousin, ended in divorce in 1910 after a long separation. The German painter Gabriele Munter was his mistress from 1902 to 1914, when he broke it off. In early 1917, the 50-year-old painter married much younger Nina Andreewsky, the daughter of a Russian general, whom he had met the prior year. In 1933, the couple moved to Paris where they lived until his death on 12/13/1944, Neuilly-Sur-Seine, France.
Link to Wikipedia biography