Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist who is widely credited with creating the first purely abstract paintings and whose theoretical writings laid the philosophical foundation for abstract art. Born in Moscow into an educated family, he studied law and economics at the University of Moscow, where he later taught. At the age of thirty he abandoned a promising academic legal career and went to Munich to study painting, enrolling at the private school of Anton Ažbé and later at the Munich Academy under Franz von Stuck. The paintings in this batch—from 1900 to 1904—represent his late figurative and transitional phase: views of Kochel am See, Dutch subjects from travels to Holland (Rotterdam, Canal in Holland, Scheveningen), Russian religious buildings (Akhtyrka, Red Church), and Bavarian landscapes. The Blue Rider (1903)—one of the works here—is among the most significant paintings in the history of modern art: a tiny figure on a galloping horse dissolving into abstraction, which would give its name to the Blaue Reiter group he would co-found with Franz Marc in 1911. Kandinsky's theoretical masterwork, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), articulated the philosophical basis for non-representational painting. He later taught at the Bauhaus (1922–1933) and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

The early works in this batch—Russian townscapes, Dutch harbour views, Bavarian mountains—show a bold, Post-Impressionist colour sense and simplified forms that already suggest the direction Kandinsky would take. His colour is high-keyed and expressive: the deep blue of the Kochel lake, the vivid red church at Akhtyrka, the saturated Dutch canal colours. Compositionally he is already moving toward flattened, pattern-based organisation rather than spatial recession. The Blue Rider prefigures the dissolution of the figure that would follow in his fully abstract work.

Kandinsky is one of the most important figures in the entire history of modern art—the painter most commonly credited with the creation of pure abstraction and the theorist who gave it philosophical grounding. The Blaue Reiter group he co-founded in Munich in 1911 was one of the pivotal moments of European avant-garde history. His Bauhaus teaching shaped art education internationally. His influence on subsequent abstract painting—from American Abstract Expressionism to European lyrical abstraction—is incalculable.