Outline Biography

Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866 but spent his early childhood in Odessa. His parents were very musical playing the piano and the zither. Kandinsky could play the piano and cello from an early age and it is important to note that music was a massive influence on his painting and can be seen from the names he gave some of his paintings: 'Compositions', Improvisations'. In 1886, he enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose to study law and economics. He later lectured at the Moscow Faculty of Law.

In 1895 Kandinsky attended a French Impressionist exhibition where he saw Monet's paintings.  He ssaid later, "It was from the catalogue that I learned this was a haystack. I was upset I had not recognized it. I also thought the painter had no right to paint in such an imprecise fashion..." Later, at the age of thirty, Kandinsky left Moscow and teaching and went to Munich to study life-drawing, sketching and anatomy.

It was not long before his talent surpassed the constraints of art school and he began exploring his own ideas of painting - "I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could..."

Kandinsky is said to have once left a landscape painting he was working on, on an easel upsidedown. Looking at the painting a couple of days later, he couldn't recognise the objests just the shapes and  it is this moment that may have given the inspiration for his move towards abstraction. Along with Mondrian and Malevitch he is considered to be one of the founding fathers of abstraction. He was an active member of  several of the most influential and controversial art movements of the 20th century, among them the Blue Rider which he founded along with Franz Marc and the Bauhaus.

In 1933, Kandinsky left Germany when the Nazi's closed down the Bauhaus and he settled near Paris, in Neuilly. Kandinsky continued painting until his death in June, 1944.