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.
He moved to Munich in 1896 to start a new life as a painter. In 1901, Kandinsky founded the exhibition and artists' association Phalanx, which made a name for itself through exhibitions of Impressionist, Neo-Impressionist and Art Nouveau paintings. There was also a painting school attached to this group. Kandinsky learns there Gabriele Münter know, his student and later partner. But acceptance of the artists' association soon waned in conservative Munich. Years of restlessness followed: Together with Münter, Kandinsky traveled through Europe and North Africa until, in 1909, Gabriele Münter purchased a house in Murnau am Staffelsee. There Kandinsky and Münter maintained friendships with other artists, among others Alexei Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin. Within the New Artists' Association of Munich, founded in 1909, their perspective broadened and the desire for new forms of visual language intensified. A development that Kandinsky discussed in his art historical work “On the Spiritual in Art” (1911) and in the book he wrote together with Franz Marc published almanac “Der Blaue Reiter” (1912).
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.