Thinkers Timeline

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist usually credited as one of the pioneers of abstract painting in the European tradition. He was born in Moscow to a prosperous tea-trading family and spent his early childhood in the southern Russian port of Odessa. He studied law and economics at Moscow University and was preparing for an academic career when, at thirty, he decided to abandon it and become a painter. He moved to Munich in 1896 and trained at the city's art academy. Over the following decade he developed from a competent painter of folk-inflected landscapes into a theorist and practitioner of a new kind of painting that dispensed with recognisable subjects. In 1910 he painted what is often regarded as one of the earliest purely abstract works, a watercolour that broke decisively with representation. He co-founded the Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, published his major theoretical work Concerning the Spiritual in Art that same year, and played a central role in the artistic ferment of the years before the First World War. He returned to Russia during the war, worked in the cultural institutions of the early Soviet period, and came back to Germany in 1921 to teach at the Bauhaus. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, he moved to Paris, where he lived until his death in 1944. He was married twice and had a long partnership with the painter Gabriele Münter during his Munich years.