As a painter and theorist, Wassily Kandinsky made a significant contribution to saying goodbye to the subject in the traditional sense. He is one of the art pioneers of the last century.
Kandinsky (1866-1944) grew up in economically secure circumstances and in a political atmosphere that was comparatively liberal for tsarist Russia in the 19th century. Kandinsky began drawing and painting early on. The experiments with watercolors and oil colors were of course not the immediate start of an artist's career. Rather, Kandinsky began studying economics and law at the age of 19. Despite a promising offer of a lectureship, he, who at the time was working in a Moscow printing house specializing in art reproductions, decided against pursuing an academic career.
In 1896, he moved to Munich to establish a new life as a painter. In 1901, Kandinsky founded the Phalanx exhibition and artists' association, which gained recognition through exhibitions of Impressionist, Neo-Impressionist, and Art Nouveau paintings. A painting school was also affiliated with this group. There, Kandinsky met Gabriele Münter , his student and later life partner. However, the artists' association soon lost its acceptance in conservative Munich. Years of restlessness followed: Kandinsky traveled with Münter through Europe and North Africa until 1909, when Gabriele Münter acquired a house in Murnau am Staffelsee. There, Kandinsky and Münter cultivated friendships with other artists, including Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin . Within the New Artists' Association of Munich, founded in 1909, their perspective broadened, and their desire for new forms of visual language intensified. This development was documented by Kandinsky in his art historical treatise "On the Spiritual in Art" (1911) and in the almanac "The Blue Rider" (1912), which he published together with Franz Marc .
The outbreak of the First World War marked a sharp turning point for Kandinsky. He left Germany and returned to his homeland. There he met Nina von Andreewsky and married her the following year. He moved with her to Weimar in 1922, and later to Dessau, to teach at the Bauhaus. In 1933 the artist had to leave Germany again and spent the rest of his life in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, where he died in 1944.