Vasily Vasilyevich Kandinsky (Moscow, 1866 – Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1944), also known by the Germanized form of his name, Wassily Kandinsky, was the painter who anticipated and, one could say, founded abstract painting.
Kandinsky’s childhood was divided between Munich and Odessa, where he began learning the basics of drawing. After earning a law degree in Moscow, he returned once again to Munich in 1896, where he enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. There, he also taught painting courses himself, with the goal of introducing French avant-garde art into an environment primarily devoted to Jugendstil. The works Kandinsky created during these years were still entirely figurative: landscapes, fantastical themes drawn from Russian folk traditions or medieval German legends. In 1902, he exhibited for the first time with the Berlin Secession, and two years later he participated in the Salon d’Automne in Paris.
The first abstract watercolor dates to 1910 and is now housed at the Centre Georges Pompidou—a true point of no return, as from that moment Kandinsky decided to abandon figurative painting entirely. The following year came Composition IV, an abstract work now held at the Tate Modern in London, and Impression III: Concert, inspired—as the title suggests—by a concert by Arnold Schoenberg, now at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich. Kandinsky’s abstract painting is often discussed in relation to music, particularly through three series of works: Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions. The Impressions retain some recognizable traces of nature and external forms; the Improvisations are spontaneous creations born from the artist’s inner creativity; the Compositions are carefully planned and consciously constructed works.
In 1912, together with fellow artist Franz Marc, Kandinsky laid the foundations for Der Blaue Reiter—a group of artists based in Munich and associated with German Expressionism. That same year, they published the movement’s almanac and opened the group’s first exhibition at the Thannhauser Gallery in Munich. Also in 1912, Kandinsky published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a key philosophical text that theorized the relationship between form and color, closely reflecting the works he was painting at the time.
Exhibitions followed: first at the Hans Goltz Gallery in Russia, and then at the Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin, which hosted a solo show for him. In 1913, when Kandinsky painted Black Lines, he took a further step—this time, it was no longer possible to speak of abstraction as starting from a recognizable subject. Instead, the line itself assumed such autonomy that it became the abstract subject of the work. That same year, he participated in the Armory Show in New York before returning to Russia at the outbreak of World War I, where he remained until 1921.
Between 1922 and 1923, he taught mural decoration at the Bauhaus school, first in Weimar and later in Dessau. At the same time, he published another important essay: Point and Line to Plane. In 1937, during the first Degenerate Artexhibition organized by the Nazi regime in Munich, fifty of Kandinsky’s works were included in the display. The following year, he took part in the Abstracte Kunst exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and in 1942, just two years before his death, he painted his final major canvas, Tensions délicates.
Up to this point, little has been said about Kandinsky’s theatrical research, which he pursued throughout his life, creating works in which form, sound, color, light, and movement blended to form a new, total work of art. His first such efforts were Paradiesgarten and Daphnis und Chloe, from 1908–1909. These were followed by the “stage compositions” created between 1909 and 1914: The Yellow Sound, The Green Sound, Black and White, and Violet. However, the only one Kandinsky succeeded in staging was Pictures at an Exhibition, based on the musical suite by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky and presented in 1928 at the Friedrich Theater in Dessau. Mussorgsky’s work was conceived as a visit to an exhibition of watercolors by painter and friend Viktor Alexandrovich Hartmann, and is structured into Promenades (the visitor’s movement through the gallery) and Pictures (the contents of the artworks on display).
Kandinsky’s own works, however, were staged by others. The Yellow Sound, for example, was brought to life by Jacques Polieri in 1975, Ian Strasfogel in 1982, the Solari-Vanzi company in 1985, and Fabrizio Crisafulli in 2002. Violet was staged by Giulio Turcato at the 1984 Venice Biennale, and again in 1996 by Kirsten Winter on the initiative of the Sprengel Museum and the Verein Kunst und Bühne of Hanover.
