Top 20 Facts about Russian painter Kandinsky

By Vasily Kandinsky – Wikimedia

Top 20 Facts about Russian Painter Kandinsky

*Originally published by Lilian on June 30th 2021 Updated by Vanessa on October 20, 2021 and Updated by Vanessa R on 2023

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was born on December 16, 1866, in Moscow Russia. He grew up in Odessa and went to Grekov Odessa Art School. Kandinsky is credited with being the father of abstract art.  

He also studied law and economics at the University of Moscow. Kandinsky practised law and also taught at the University of Dorpat, which is now in Estonia.

Kandinsky started painting when he turned 30. This was when he left his teaching career and moved to Germany. He trained in Munich to be an artist, where he met Gabriele Münter.

It was in Munich that he started playing around with colours and was drawn into abstract painting. He was greatly influenced by music and this can be seen in most of his paintings.

Kandinsky’s art was also influenced by Claude Monet, a French Impressionist. He depicted emotion in his art pieces of landscapes and the countryside.

His use of bold colours was not common during his era. Here’s more about Kandinsky.

1. His love of art started with a love for colour

Kandinsky not only learned law and economics while in school, but he also learned art. Growing up, he was fascinated by colour, and this continued into his older years.

In 1889, Kandinsky joined a group of ethnographic researchers who travelled to the Vologda region north of Moscow. He described the houses and churches that were decorated with shimmering colours as moving paintings.

Kandinsky borrowed the use of bright colours on dark backgrounds in most of his early works. It was at this point that he compared his art to composing music.

2. Kandinsky loved music too

By Wassily Kandinsky – Wikimedia

Music greatly influenced his art. His greater love for art made him quit practising law and go to Munich to study art. This was after he took part in a big art production of Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Bolshoi Theatre.

He described how music influenced his work as a full force of the twilight hour. When he listened to the violin or the deep bass, he pictured colours in his mind.

Music inspired Kandinsky to create new art pieces in his career. His piece Impression III was inspired after he attended a concert by Arnold Schoenberg in Munich.   

3. Kandinsky had a good career as a lawyer

Although Kandinsky had a successful career as an artist, his law career flourished as well. He studied law because his parents saw that as a fit career for him.

Kandinsky became a law professor at the University of Dorpat until he was 30 years old.

4. He fully got into art at 30

By Wassily Kandinsky – Wikimedia

Kandinsky began seriously pursuing art when he turned 30 years old. During his time, this was considered late but he had loved art since he was a child.

Before he went to Germany, he saw a piece of art done by Monet in Moscow. He loved Monet’s Impressionism which portrayed colour as independent from other objects in the frame.

He studied art at Munich Academy and was taught by Franz von Stuck. Kandinsky did not get admission easy, so his time out of self-study.

5. Kandinsky is credited as being the father of abstract art

By Wassily Kandinsky – Wikimedia

The first abstract art produced by Kandinsky was in 1911 called the Picture with a circle. It was the first abstract painting in the world.

The piece of art is hung at the National Museum of Georgia in Tbilisi. He was quoted saying that nature-inspired his creativity.  

Colour set the main emotion of his work it helped him create a perfect composition. The combination of planes and lines create movement.     

Before his Composition VIII in 1923, all elements that he used on this painting were removed.

6. He had an easy time in art school

Art school is usually considered difficult by many students. This was not the same for Kandinsky. It was during his time in art school that he emerged as an art theorist.

In the 20^th century, Kandinsky worked on more paintings than he ever did. He painted several landscapes and towns using colourful paintings.

Most of his paintings did not feature human figures. The ones that did include Sunday, Old Russian, and Couple oh Horseback. The latter featured a man tenderly holding a woman on a horseback.  

He used colours to express his experience of subject matter, not to describe objective nature.

7. The Blue Rider is one of his most important paintings

By Wassily Kandinsky – Wikimedia

The most important painting by Kandinsky was from the first decade of the 1900s, The Blue Rider (1903). The figure in the painting is wearing a cloak and is on a speeding horse.

In the foreground of the painting, are more amorphous blue shadows, the counterparts of the fall trees in the background. Art historians believe that a second figure is being held by the rider.

In this painting, Kandinsky shows the rider more as a series of colours than in specific detail. It shows the direction Kandinsky would take only a few years later.

8. Kandinsky was an art theorist

In addition to painting, Kandinsky was an art theorist who influenced the history of Western art. Most of the art was inspired by his theoretical works than from his paintings.

Kandinsky founded the Munich New Artists’ Association and was the president in 1909. Unfortunately, the association was dissolved two years later because the members could not catch up with Kandinsky’s artistic concepts.

He formed a new group and named it the Blue Rider with fellow minded artists, August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch, and Gabriele Münter. They had two exhibitions.

9. Art was synonymous with religion to Kandinsky

By Wassily Kandinsky – Wikimedia

Art was a form of worship for Kandinsky. He said that colour greatly influences the soul. He also felt that the use of colour was not only representing objects and forms but also a method of reaching a level of spirituality.

Kandinsky compared the spiritual life of humanity to a pyramid where the artist’s mission is to lead others to the pinnacle with his work.

10. He met with Monet; through a painting

Everything changed for Kandinsky in 1896 when he came upon a painting from Monet’s ‘Haystack’ series in an exhibition. The painting blew his mind away and he could not stop talking about it.

He was inspired by Monet’s Impressionism of the harvest landscape. Kandinsky described this painting as a fairy tale and magnificence.   

11. The Nazis regarded his work as being “degenerate”

Kandinsky was a teacher at the Weimar, Germany-based Bauhaus school in 1921. The Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close in 1933, the same year that Kandinsky moved to Paris and spent his final 11 years there. In the Nazi raid, the first three paintings in the Compositions series were taken and destroyed, including the pieces displayed at the controversial “Degenerate Art” exhibition held in Munich in 1937.

12.  He had Three different citizenships

Throughout his life, Kandinsky resided in France, Germany, and Russia. He also underwent two citizenship changes. He was born a Russian, acquired German citizenship, and after suffering Nazi persecution, filed for French citizenship.

13. Kandinsky was a founder and leading member of The Blue Rider group

Kandinsky founded the Der Blaue Reiter collective with other creatives who shared his vision (The Blue Rider). The collective, which included some of the most well-known expressionist artists, published an almanack and held exhibitions. Der Blaue Reiter ran from 1911 to 1914, although it stopped early because the First World War’s beginning caused disruptions. The Blue Rider is regarded by critics as the precursor and forerunner of modern art in the twentieth century.

14. His detractors labelled him a drug addict and a lunatic

The steady simplification and destruction of form that Kandinsky practised in both his painting and xylography were the precursors to his earliest abstract works. Picasso, Braque, and van Dongen were among the painters that participated in the second exhibition of the New Munich Artists’ Association in 1910, while Kandinsky displayed his “Sketch for “Composition II” during the event (Guggenheim Museum, New York). Critics panned the piece, claiming that it was painted by a madman or someone who was “under the influence of morphine or hashish,” among other disparaging remarks.

15. He did not conform to the spirit of the USSR

Wassily Kandinsky produced a great deal of artwork. Kandinsky produced almost 200 paintings and a large number of sketches between 1909 and 1914 as he developed abstraction. Many of them have been lost.  They were hidden in storerooms and shipped to regional museums in the Soviet Union because they did not adhere to socialist realism, which was the dominant art movement at the time. They were categorised as “degenerate art” in Nazi Germany.

16. Kandinsky returned to Russia in 1914, but he fled the country after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917

Georges Meguerditchian – Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1914, Kandinsky returned to Russia after World War I and served as a commissar in the new regime’s Culture Ministry. However, he became disillusioned with the Bolsheviks’ strict control over art and culture and feared for his own safety as they increasingly cracked down on dissent.

In 1921, he accepted the opportunity to teach at the Bauhaus School of Art and Design in Germany and left Russia for the last time. Kandinsky’s decision to flee Russia may have been due to his independence, his spirituality, and his fear of being targeted for perceived dissent. Despite these reasons, Kandinsky’s decision to leave Russia was wise, as he found a new home and career in Germany, where he flourished as an artist and teacher, inspiring and influencing artists worldwide.

17. Kandinsky was a synesthete, meaning that he experienced different senses simultaneously

Kandinsky, a synesthete, experienced different senses simultaneously, such as seeing colours when hearing music. This neurological condition affected 2–4% of the population and greatly influenced his art. Kandinsky believed that art should appeal to all senses, not just sight, and he wanted his paintings to be a synesthetic experience for the viewer.

His synesthesia is evident in his writings, where he associates colours and shapes with different musical notes. Kandinsky’s synesthesia allowed him to experience the world differently and create visually and emotionally stunning paintings. An example of how Kandinsky’s synesthesia influenced his art is his painting Composition VII, inspired by Richard Wagner’s music, which uses bright colors and shapes to evoke movement and energy. His synesthesia inspired some of the most iconic and innovative works of modern art.

18. Kandinsky was a writer and theorist

Adolf ElnainPhoto credits : Georges Meguerditchian – Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Wassily Kandinsky was a renowned art theorist and writer, known for his numerous books and articles on art. His works, such as Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), Point and Line to Plane (1926), and Backwards Glimpses (1933), explored various aspects of art, such as abstraction, artist roles, and the connection between art and spirituality. Kandinsky was one of the first artists to write about the creative process, sharing his insights and techniques with his readers.

19. His work influenced many other artists

After studying law and economics in Moscow, where he was born in 1866, he moved to Munich in 1896. Influenced by symbolism, Impressionism, and post-impressionism, Kandinsky explored the connection between colour and emotion in his early abstract paintings throughout the first part of the 20th century.

In his perspective, art should arouse feelings in the observer and be a spiritual experience. Drawing support for non-representational art and creating the Blaue Reiter group, Kandinsky published On the Spiritual in Art in 1911. Even though Kandinsky’s paintings were controversial at the time, they are now valued highly and continue to influence artists and art enthusiasts.

20. Kandinsky’s work has been sold for millions of dollars at auction

Wassily Kandinsky, a prominent 20th-century artist, has consistently ranked among the top-selling works at art auctions. In 2023, his painting Murnau mit Kirche II sold for $44.5 million at Sotheby’s in London, marking the highest price ever paid for a Kandinsky painting at auction. Other notable paintings include Around the Circle, Composition VII, and Studie für Improvisation 8.

These high prices are a testament to Kandinsky’s artistic significance and enduring popularity among collectors. His innovative use of colour, form, and composition, as well as his emotional power, have made his paintings a favourite among collectors. The strength of the art market has also contributed to these high prices.