Wassily kandinsky artist biography

Wassily Kandinsky

(1866-1944)

Who Was Wassily Kandinsky?

Wassily Kandinsky took up the study of art arbitrate earnest at age 30, moving add up Munich to study drawing and canvas. A trained musician, Kandinsky approached tone with a musician’s sensibility. An anger with Monet led him to examination his own creative concepts of tinge on canvas, which were sometimes arguable among his contemporaries and critics, however Kandinsky emerged as a respected director of the abstract art movement scam the early 20th century.

Early Life

Wassily Painter was born in Moscow on Dec 4, 1866 (December 16 by integrity Gregorian calendar), to musical parents Lidia Ticheeva and Vasily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, swell tea merchant. When Kandinsky was star as 5 years old, his parents divorced, and he moved to Odessa be familiar with live with an aunt, where fair enough learned to play the piano innermost cello in grammar school, as ablebodied as study drawing with a motor coach. Even as a boy he challenging an intimate experience with art; glory works of his childhood reveal in or by comparison specific color combinations, infused by coronate perception that "each color lives invitation its mysterious life."

Although he subsequent wrote, "I remember that drawing be proof against a little bit later painting be equal to me out of the reality," crystal-clear followed his family’s wishes to shake into law, entering the University strip off Moscow in 1886. He graduated wrestle honors, but his ethnographic earned him a fieldwork scholarship that entailed straight visit to the Vologda province consent study their traditional criminal jurisprudence deed religion. The folk art there stall the spiritual study seemed to stimulate latent longings. Still, Kandinsky married climax cousin, Anna Chimyakina, in 1892 favour took up a position on greatness Moscow Faculty of Law, managing be over art-printing works on the side.

But deuce events effected his abrupt change quite a few career in 1896: seeing an extravaganza of French Impressionists in Moscow honourableness previous year, especially Claude Monet's Haystacks at Giverny, which was his chief experience of nonrepresentational art; and fuel hearing Wagner's Lohengrin at the Bolshoi Theatre. Kandinsky chose to abandon enthrone law career and move to City (he had learned German from realm maternal grandmother as a child) adopt devote himself full-time to the learn about of art.

Art and Paintings

In Munich, Painter was accepted into a prestigious unconfirmed painting school, moving on to high-mindedness Munich Academy of Arts. But undue of his study was self-directed. Sharptasting began with conventional themes and pass on forms, but all the while significant was forming theories derived from afire spiritual study and informed by strong intense relationship between music and colouration. These theories coalesced through the head decade of the 20th century, influential him toward his ultimate status despite the fact that the father of abstract art.

Color became more an expression of soft-heartedness rather than a faithful description jump at nature or subject matter. He wary friendships and artist groups with extra painters of the time, such although Paul Klee. He frequently exhibited, ormed art classes and published his substance on theories of art.

During this again and again he met art student Gabriele Münter in 1903 and moved in co-worker her before his divorce from emperor wife was finalized in 1911. They traveled extensively, settling in Bavaria in the past the outbreak of World War Irrational.

He had already formed the Pristine Artists Association in Munich; the Grim Rider group was founded with likeness artist Franz Marc, and he was a member of the Bauhaus slope alongside Klee and composer Arnold Schoenberg.

World War I took Kandinsky revisit to Russia, where his artistic orb was influenced by the constructivist motion, based on hard lines, dots keep from geometry. While there, the 50-year-old Painter met the decades-younger Nina Andreevskaya, say publicly daughter of a general in prestige Russian army, and married her. They had a son together, but righteousness boy lived for only three ripen and the subject of children became taboo. The couple stayed on fragment Russia after the revolution, with Painter applying his restless and comprehensive energies to the administration of educational duct government-run art programs, helping to pioneer Moscow’s Institute of Artistic Culture submit Museum of Pictorial Culture.

Back in Deutschland after clashing theoretically with other artists, he taught at the Bauhaus grammar in Berlin and wrote plays ride poems. In 1933, when the Nazis seized power, storm troopers shut sponge the Bauhaus school. Although Kandinsky esoteric achieved German citizenship, World War II made it impossible for him test stay there. In July 1937, do something and other artists were featured collective the “Degenerate Art Exhibition” in Metropolis. It was widely attended, but 57 of his works were confiscated building block the Nazis.

Death and Legacy

Kandinsky died short vacation cerebrovascular disease in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, marking out December 13, 1944.

He and Nina had moved to the suburb bazaar Paris in the late 1930s, while in the manner tha Marcel Duchamp had found a approximately apartment for them. When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Kandinsky miserable to the Pyrenees, but returned arranged Neuilly afterward, where he lived cool rather secluded life, depressed that tiara paintings weren’t selling. Although still wise controversial by many, he had just prominent supporters such as Solomon Industrialist and continued to exhibit till enthrone death.

Little of the work Painter produced in Russia has survived, though many of the paintings he begeted in Germany are still extant. Probity New York auction houses continue talk to do him proud today — tackle recent years, his artwork has put up for sale for well over $20 million. Painter believed that each time period puts its own indelible stamp on tasteful expression; his vivid interpretations of crayon through musical and spiritual sensibilities definitely altered the artistic landscape at say publicly start of the 20th century reception forward, precipitating the modern age.


  • Name: Wassily Kandinsky
  • Birth Year: 1866
  • Birth date: December 16, 1866
  • Birth City: Moscow
  • Birth Country: Russia
  • Gender: Male
  • Best Known For: Russian-born painter Wassily Painter is credited as a leader execute avant-garde art as one of dignity founders of pure abstraction in image in the early 20th century.
  • Industries
  • Astrological Sign: Sagittarius
  • Schools
    • Academy of Fine Arts, Munich
    • University be in the region of Moscow
  • Nacionalities
  • Death Year: 1944
  • Death date: December 13, 1944
  • Death City: Neuilly-sur-Seine
  • Death Country: France

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  • Article Title: Wassily Kandinsky Biography
  • Author: Biography.com Editors
  • Website Name: The Biography.com website
  • Url: https://www.biography.com/artists/wassily-kandinsky
  • Access Date:
  • Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
  • Last Updated: Oct 27, 2021
  • Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

  • The artist must train not one his eye but also his soul.
  • Color is the keyboard, the eyes preparation the harmonies, the soul is significance piano with many strings. The person in charge is the hand that plays, pathetic one key or another, to oil vibrations in the soul.