Wassily Kandinsky — painter with roots in the Russian Empire
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was born in Moscow on 16 December 1866, the son of a prosperous tea merchant from Kyakhta on the Mongolian border. The family moved to Odessa when he was five, and his parents divorced soon afterwards; he was brought up largely by an aunt. He later recalled the colours of Moscow, its domes and the Russian fairy tales of his childhood as his first visual revelations.
He studied law and economics at Moscow University and began an academic career. In 1889 he joined an ethnographic expedition to the Vologda Governorate to study the peasant law and folk beliefs of the Komi people, and the brightly painted interiors of their houses stayed with him. In 1896, at thirty, he turned down a law professorship at Dorpat and went to Munich to study painting, having been struck by one of Claude Monet's Haystacks at an exhibition in Moscow.
In Munich he founded the Phalanx exhibition society, travelled widely, and moved through Art Nouveau and Russian folk motifs towards abstraction. In 1911 he and Franz Marc founded the group Der Blaue Reiter, and he published On the Spiritual in Art, which argued that colour and form could act on the soul directly, like music. Works such as Composition VII (1913) are counted among the first fully abstract paintings in European art.
The outbreak of war in 1914 forced him, as a Russian subject, to leave Germany. He returned to Moscow, married Nina Andreevskaya in 1917, and after the revolution worked in the new Soviet cultural institutions, including the People's Commissariat for Education and the Institute of Artistic Culture. As official policy turned towards Constructivism and art in the service of production, he found himself out of step, and in 1921 he left for Berlin.
From 1922 to 1933 he taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, and in 1926 published Point and Line to Plane. He became a German citizen in 1928. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933 he moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, became a French citizen in 1939, and continued to paint through the German occupation. He died at Neuilly on 13 December 1944, aged seventy-seven.
"Left Russia permanently in 1921 for Germany amid post-revolutionary cultural upheaval."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Moscow
He credited Russian fairy tales and the city's domed skyline as formative visual revelations.
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Moscow. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
""Color is a power which directly influences the soul.""