Wassily Kandinsky

Born in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky first studied law and economics before making a dramatic change and moving to Munich in his thirties to train as an artist. That late start did not slow him down: he became one of the key figures in early modern art and helped push painting away from direct representation and toward abstraction.

His work moved through several striking phases, from vividly colored landscapes and folk-inspired scenes to the bold abstract compositions for which he is best known. He was closely linked with the Blue Rider group in Munich and later taught at the Bauhaus, where his ideas about color, form, and spiritual expression reached a wide audience.

When the Bauhaus was closed under Nazi pressure, he left Germany for France, where he spent his final years. He died in 1944 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. Alongside his paintings, his writings on art helped shape how generations of artists and readers understood abstraction.