Wassily Kandinsky Biography Quotes 5 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Vasily Vasilyevich Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866 and spent parts of his childhood in Moscow and Odessa. Early exposure to music and folk art left a lasting imprint; he learned piano and cello and cultivated a sensitive ear that would later shape his approach to painting. He studied law and economics at the University of Moscow and began a conventional academic career. A crucial turning point came in the mid-1890s when he encountered French Impressionist painting, notably Claude Monet, and experienced a powerful sensation that color could carry meaning independent of objects. A performance of Wagner also suggested to him that art might function like music, evoking inner states without depicting the external world. In 1896 he moved to Munich to study art, relinquishing his secure path in law.

Munich and Artistic Formation
In Munich, Kandinsky trained first at the private school of Anton Azbe and later at the Academy of Fine Arts under Franz von Stuck. He gravitated toward a circle of international artists, including Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, who were exploring new directions in color and form. In 1901 he helped organize the Phalanx group and school, where he taught and exhibited, and where he met the painter Gabriele Munter. Munter became his close companion for more than a decade; they traveled widely through Europe and North Africa, studying medieval and folk traditions and absorbing influences outside academic art. By the mid-1900s Kandinsky's landscapes and village scenes grew increasingly simplified and vibrant, with bold outlines and heightened color signaling his departure from naturalism.

Murnau and The Blue Rider
Around 1908 he and Munter settled part-time in Murnau, a Bavarian town whose intense light and vernacular architecture fed his experiments with saturated color and flattened space. Kandinsky helped found the Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen (NKVM) in 1909, a group dedicated to progressive art. Disagreements over artistic direction led him and others to establish Der Blaue Reiter in 1911 with Franz Marc. The group, which also included figures such as August Macke and intersected with the work of Paul Klee, emphasized the expressive and spiritual power of color and form. Kandinsky co-edited the Blue Rider Almanac with Marc, assembling essays, reproductions, and musical material to demonstrate affinities across cultures and arts. He forged a notable dialogue with the composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose atonal music paralleled Kandinsky's quest for abstraction. His treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art articulated a vision of painting grounded in inner necessity, proposing that colors and shapes could act like musical tones to resonate with the viewer's psyche.

War and Return to Russia
The outbreak of the First World War compelled Kandinsky, a Russian citizen, to leave Germany. He returned to Moscow in 1914, joining an artistic scene transformed by revolution. He participated in cultural administration and education, advocating for museums and curricula that would give space to new art. While he shared with Russian avant-garde artists a commitment to innovation, his spiritual idealism diverged from the utilitarian and constructivist aims advanced by Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, and others. His interactions with Kazimir Malevich and the debates within the Institute of Artistic Culture underscored the split between formal, non-objective research and his broader metaphysical outlook. By 1921, amid increasing pressure and institutional shifts, he left Russia for Germany.

Bauhaus Years
Walter Gropius invited Kandinsky to join the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922. There he taught form and color theory, developed analytical exercises that linked basic shapes to chromatic harmonies, and collaborated with colleagues including Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, László Moholy-Nagy, and Josef Albers. When the school moved to Dessau in 1925, Kandinsky continued to refine a precise, geometric abstraction that still aimed at inner resonance. His book Point and Line to Plane (1926) gave systematic structure to his ideas about visual elements, rhythm, and composition. The Bauhaus period placed him at the center of one of the twentieth century's most influential schools, through the directorships of Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and later Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. As political pressure mounted in Germany, the Bauhaus faced attacks; in 1933 the Nazis forced its closure and condemned avant-garde artworks, including many by Kandinsky.

Exile in France and Late Work
Kandinsky moved to France in 1933 and settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. He became a French citizen in 1939. In these years his art absorbed new influences from Surrealism and the natural sciences, yielding biomorphic forms, refined palettes, and delicate networks of line. He experimented with texture by mixing sand with pigment and pursued subtle chromatic harmonies in carefully balanced compositions. Although he was geographically and linguistically somewhat isolated, he maintained contact with former Bauhaus colleagues and continued writing and reflecting on art. The Second World War brought hardship, but he persisted with a steady studio practice. He died in 1944 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, leaving behind a body of work that traced a path from expressive landscapes to fully non-objective painting.

Personal Life
Kandinsky's personal relationships shaped his development and legacy. His long partnership with Gabriele Munter nurtured a formative period that included the Murnau years and the founding of Der Blaue Reiter; her stewardship preserved an essential archive of his early paintings and documents when political turmoil threatened their loss. In 1917 he married Nina Kandinsky (born Nina Andreevskaya), who supported his work through his late Russian years, the Bauhaus decade, and exile in France, and later became a careful custodian of his estate.

Legacy and Influence
Kandinsky emerged as a leading theorist and practitioner of abstraction. His writings provided a conceptual framework for artists seeking non-objective means to convey feeling and thought. His teaching affected generations through the Bauhaus, spreading to art schools in Europe and the United States as Bauhaus faculty and students dispersed. His art informed developments in European abstraction and later currents such as Abstract Expressionism, which echoed his belief in the capacity of color, line, and form to act directly on the viewer. Collaborations and exchanges with artists and composers, from Franz Marc and Paul Klee to Arnold Schoenberg, exemplified his conviction that the arts share deep structural affinities. Across shifting centers in Moscow, Munich, Weimar and Dessau, and Paris, Kandinsky's commitment to the spiritual dimension of art remained constant, making him one of the defining figures of twentieth-century modernism.

Our collection contains 5 quotes who is written by Wassily, under the main topics: Art - Music.

Other people realated to Wassily: Walter Gropius (Architect), Robert Delaunay (Artist), Max Bill (Architect)