by Tom Gurney
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on October 14, 2023
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
Wassily Kandinsky: A Life Across Four Settings
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) made art in several countries and under remarkably different conditions. He left an academic path in Moscow to learn painting in Munich, worked with artists who formed the Blue Rider circle, returned to Russia during the First World War, taught at the Bauhaus and spent his last decade near Paris. His paintings changed markedly across those settings, but the life is richer than a story in which a lawyer suddenly “invented” abstract art. He made prints, watercolours, drawings, painted glass and large canvases, and wrote about how colour and form could act on a viewer. This biography follows the decisions, relationships and disruptions that made those varied works possible. [1]; [3].
The accompanying timeline is designed for checking individual dates. The artist overview offers routes through major works and ideas. Here, dates serve a different purpose: they show when Kandinsky had to establish a new working life, how collaborations shaped opportunity, and why no one period can stand for his whole career. Museum accounts sometimes disagree about secondary details. Where an exact year remains unsettled, this page keeps the established sequence without supplying false precision.
Watch: Wassily Kandinsky
Five museum videos about Kandinsky’s art, sources of inspiration and the relationship between colour and music.
Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle
Curator Megan Fontanella introduces Kandinsky and the Guggenheim collection.
Watch on YouTubeAt a Glance
- Born:1866, Moscow; childhood partly in Odessa.
- Died:13 December 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris.
- Training:law and political economy in Moscow; art studies in Munich after 1896.
- Main settings:Munich and Murnau, Russia, the Bauhaus in Germany, and Neuilly-sur-Seine.
- Media:oil painting, watercolour, drawing, printmaking, painted glass, writing and teaching.
- Close collaborators:Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc and Bauhaus colleagues including Paul Klee.
Kandinsky in context
German Expressionist circles
c. 1905–1920Der Blaue Reiter
1911–1914Bauhaus
1919–1933Wassily Kandinsky
active 1896–1944Gabriele Münter
Munich/Murnau shared yearsFranz Marc
Blue Rider collaborationPaul Klee
Bauhaus colleaguesThe Blue Rider
1903Blue Mountain
1908–09Composition VII
1913Composition VIII
1923Several Circles
1926Sky Blue
1940Contents
- Moscow and Odessa before the artist's career
- Choosing Munich: training, Phalanx and a new circle
- Journeys before Murnau
- Murnau and the independence of colour
- The Blue Rider, music and writing
- Beyond the framed canvas
- Return to Russia: work amid war and revolution
- Bauhaus life: Weimar, Dessau and Berlin
- Showing and collecting a transnational career
- Neuilly-sur-Seine and the final decade
- Relationships without a single-school story
- After Kandinsky: collections and a changing reputation
- Frequently asked questions
- References
Moscow and Odessa before the artist's career
Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866. He spent part of his childhood in Odessa and learned music and drawing alongside a broad education. The Centre Pompidou describes a comfortable, cultured family and records lessons in piano and cello. Such details help place his later interest in comparisons between music and painting, but they cannot by themselves explain a canvas made many decades later. The biography needs the distance between a child's lessons and an adult's artistic decisions. [1]; [7].
In 1885 he began to study law in Moscow. He pursued university work seriously, completed research and moved towards an academic position. The Pompidou chronology records a dissertation on workers' wages in 1893 and his refusal of a teaching position in 1895. MoMA similarly describes an abandoned academic law career. These are firmer anchors than the popular image of a man who saw one painting and instantly became an artist. Particular exhibitions and experiences mattered to him, yet a complete explanation would need his own words in context and evidence for the timing. What can be stated securely is that his decision was a change of profession made near the age of thirty, after years of study. [1]; [3].
The Russian years also formed a background he did not simply leave behind. City views, memories of Moscow and an interest in stories returned at different points in his work. A biography can note those continuities without claiming a fixed national character for every form or colour. Kandinsky later worked in Germany and France, and the institutions that now hold his art are spread across those countries and beyond. The repeated moves are part of how the work developed and part of why its record must be reconstructed from more than one collection.
Choosing Munich: training, Phalanx and a new circle
Kandinsky moved to Munich in 1896 to study art. The city offered art schools, exhibitions and a network of people testing alternatives to conventional academic painting. The Centre Pompidou places his entry into Munich's fine-arts school in 1900. This corrects a common compressed account that makes his arrival in 1896 the date of academy enrolment and a flourishing career. A new career had begun, but it was still being learned and organised. [1].
In 1901 he helped form Phalanx, an association that combined a school with exhibitions. It gave artists a means to teach and to show work outside a narrow academic route. Kandinsky met Gabriele Münter in 1902 through this setting. Münter had her own artistic practice; her landscapes and later role in preserving works should be understood as the acts of an artist, not merely as supportive episodes in Kandinsky's story. Their relationship linked working, travel, friendship and domestic life over the following years. [1]; [2].
The early work ranged across media. He painted small landscapes and imagined scenes, and made prints whose simplified forms could carry vivid colour and story. The 1903 Blue Rider painting belongs to this earlier period: a mounted figure crosses a landscape. Its title resembles that of the group established years later, but the painting is not a record of the 1911 group. The Golden Sail, also from the early years, is a multicolour print in which a boat and shore are transformed by stark dark masses and a bright sail. Looking at these works before the later large Compositions makes Kandinsky's path harder to reduce to a single leap. [5].
MoMA's German Expressionism collection essay emphasises the scale of his printmaking: woodcuts, book projects and later drypoints occupied a substantial part of the practice. It places many early prints between 1900 and 1911 and describes the increasingly abstract woodcuts for Klänge (Sounds). The act of cutting an image down to a few lines and shapes offered a distinct kind of experiment in form. It would be misleading to speak of this only as preparation for painting, because the prints were finished objects, circulated in their own ways and viewed at a different scale. [3].
Journeys before Murnau
After Phalanx closed in 1903, Kandinsky and Münter travelled widely, including stays in Europe and North Africa. Around 1906 he spent a year in the Paris area. These journeys gave him changing cities, landscapes, exhibitions and working companions. A small view made while travelling has a different tempo from a large canvas planned over months; both can be part of the same search for an image that does more than repeat what the eye sees. The Centre Pompidou describes early travel paintings almost as a record of perception. They retain recognisable places while beginning to privilege colour and arrangement over descriptive detail. [1].
It would be too neat to say travel “caused” abstraction. Kandinsky encountered art and artists in several countries, but the changes unfolded in particular works and in a community of discussion. Portraits, riders, settlements and landscapes still appear in this period. Couple Riding, dated 1906–07 by the Lenbachhaus, shows how an early figurative scene could use sparkle and pattern to reshape the atmosphere around its figures. It belongs beside the small landscapes and prints of his travelling years, long before the large pre-war Compositions. [8].
These years also complicate the label “Expressionist painter”. It is a useful broad context for part of the career, especially in Munich, but Kandinsky worked with print publishers, in books and across media. His ambitions grew through experiments that were sometimes modest in scale. A single later painting can dominate reproductions; a biography has to recover the habits of making that a highlight image conceals.
Murnau and the independence of colour
In 1908 Kandinsky worked in Murnau in the Bavarian Alps among artists including Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin. The setting became a turning point in many accounts. Houses, roads and mountains were still visible, yet pictures could be built from large colour patches and simplified contours rather than from a patient description of surfaces. The artists shared circumstances and looked at one another's work, while retaining different styles and aims. The change is best seen as a set of trials, not as the discovery of one formula. [1]; [2].
Blue Mountain, dated 1908–09 by the Guggenheim, brings three riders under a blue mass between red and yellow trees. The scene is still readable, but the force and proportion of the colours shape its effect. It is a useful bridge between early riders and later works that loosen the bond between form and visible subject. The object should not be confused with another Kandinsky mountain painting in the Lenbachhaus. Individual records matter when titles and motifs recur. [4].
Kandinsky also explored Bavarian reverse glass painting. Its surface, sequence of application and brightness differ from oil on canvas. Folk art mattered to the Murnau circle, but it was not a source to be copied mechanically. A glass painting could suggest ways to make colour appear luminous and lines decisive; a woodcut could make a motif more compressed. This range of techniques is one reason a biography should not narrate change only through a sequence of oil paintings. The Centre Pompidou's survey treats such experiments as central to his work. [1].
In 1909 Kandinsky helped found the New Artists' Association of Munich, often abbreviated NKVM. Exhibitions provided a way to put new work before viewers and also created disputes about artistic direction. The association was an important step in the network from which the Blue Rider would emerge. Its history is not simply a list of names: it shows how a painter seeking a more independent role for colour also needed practical structures for showing work.
The Blue Rider, music and writing
Kandinsky met Franz Marc around 1910. Their shared project, Der Blaue Reiter, formed in 1911 amid disagreements within the Munich association. The Blue Rider was a network of exhibitions, an almanac and exchange across forms of art. Münter, Marc and others contributed to the setting; no single formal style defined every participant. The name can invite confusion with Kandinsky's 1903 rider picture, but the historical group arose later. [1]; [2].
Music entered this network as a model for thinking and making, not as a guaranteed key to decode every image. Kandinsky attended a Munich concert of Arnold Schönberg's music on 1 January 1911 and began corresponding with the composer. Impression III (Concert) emerged from that encounter. Its dark piano, audience and yellow field move between a recognisable occasion and colours that work on their own terms. The correspondence documents an intellectual connection. It does not require an unsupported claim that Kandinsky literally saw sounds as colours. [1]; [5].
The first edition of his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art appeared in December 1911, although its printed date is 1912. The Blue Rider Almanac appeared in 1912. The texts argued for the force of artistic content and for the expressive possibilities of line, colour and form beyond a faithful copy of an object. The almanac gathered different images and essays to support a wide idea of art. It is useful to distinguish drafting, exhibition and publication dates: an idea could be explored on paper before a book appeared, and a painting could be made in dialogue with discussions rather than simply illustrate a finished theory. [1].
Kandinsky used titles such as Impression, Improvisation and Composition to signal different ways of beginning and developing a work. A Composition could involve considerable preparation. Composition VII, painted in 1913, is a large, crowded canvas, but the sense of release on its surface should not hide the studies behind it. Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) preserves identifiable cannon forms within a dynamic arrangement. Such works question a simple division between pictures of things and pictures of pure form. Even where a subject remains, colour and line do more than outline it. [4].
The First World War interrupted this Munich environment. In 1914 Kandinsky left Germany, moving through Switzerland before returning to Russia. The group could not continue its exhibition programme as before. The separation from Münter was also a major change in his personal life. Works he left in her care later became central to the Lenbachhaus collection, but the meaning of their shared years should not be reduced to that later act of preservation. [1].
Beyond the framed canvas
Kandinsky's life as an artist included projects that a list of famous paintings cannot show. The Centre Pompidou describes “scenic compositions”, forms of musical theatre for which he considered text, stage setting and performance. In Murnau he worked on the interior of Münter's house, including painted furniture and a balustrade. In 1914 he made decorative panels for the New York apartment of Edwin R. Campbell. These undertakings put his ideas about colour and composition into rooms and sequences, where a viewer moves or listens rather than standing before one fixed rectangle. [1].
The projects also correct a tempting biography formula: painter becomes theorist, then teacher. He was often doing more than one thing at once. A 1911 canvas responded to a concert while letters carried an exchange with its composer; a book was drafted alongside prints and exhibitions; a room could be painted while large canvases were under consideration. His practical roles in an association or school did not stand outside the art. They made particular experiments possible and exposed him to other people's work. None of that proves a direct cause for an individual picture, but it describes the breadth of the working life in which the pictures took shape.
The same breadth continued at the Bauhaus. The Centre Pompidou points to designs for a 1922 Juryfreie exhibition entrance and a 1931 Music Room. They show why Kandinsky's teaching years should not be represented solely by diagrams of circles and triangles. A painted environment asks how colour occupies a viewer's field; a work on paper asks how little can create tension on a page. The questions are related, yet neither is a reduced copy of the other. [1].
Return to Russia: work amid war and revolution
From 1914 to 1921 Kandinsky lived chiefly in Russia, including Moscow. The changed political and material circumstances altered what was possible. Large oil canvases were fewer; drawings and watercolours became particularly important. The Centre Pompidou treats its Moscow-period works on paper as a significant part of the collection, not as the trace of a creative gap. This is a crucial correction to accounts that describe the years only as an interruption between Blue Rider and Bauhaus. [1].
The 1916 Zubovsky Platz returns to a Moscow city setting. It shows that observation of place had not disappeared from Kandinsky's practice. A separate 1916 work catalogued in Milan survives as a watercolour study for the lost Picture with Two Red Spots. It must be distinguished from the missing finished painting and from the numbered Compositions. The Moscow years can appear sparsely represented if a story counts only large canvases, but object records reveal a broader practice. [6].
Kandinsky married Nina Andreyevskaya in 1917. Following the revolution, he worked in new cultural institutions and participated in artistic education. Pompidou records work for IZO in 1918 and teaching in Moscow studios. These roles placed him amid debates about how art should be organised and taught. It would be misleading to treat them as merely a distraction from “real” painting. The question of how a form communicates could be pursued in a drawing, in a classroom and in a public institution, even though those settings imposed very different demands. [1].
The later move back to Germany took place in stages around 1921–22. The shift from Moscow to the Bauhaus is often told as a stylistic pivot to geometry. Some works do place circles, lines and planes more conspicuously on the surface. Yet there was no single day when Kandinsky abandoned one visual language and adopted another. He carried earlier questions about colour, sound, inner necessity and composition into a new teaching environment. The local timeline separates the 1921 departure from the start of Bauhaus teaching in 1922.
Bauhaus life: Weimar, Dessau and Berlin
Kandinsky began teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922. The school had been founded in 1919, before his arrival. It gathered workshops and experiments in the relation of art, craft, design and architecture. Kandinsky's role included teaching about form and colour and engaging with work beyond easel painting. His colleague Paul Klee offers a valuable comparison: both explored the expressive potential of apparently simple marks, but they should not be collapsed into a single style or treated as though one artist's forms automatically explain the other's. [1].
The 1923 Composition VIII offers a striking change from the densely interwoven Composition VII. Circles, lines and angles seem to occupy a more open field. The contrast is real, but the picture's relations of scale, colour and placement are still expressive choices rather than a mathematical proof. The word “geometric” describes part of its vocabulary without describing all that a viewer sees. Works on paper, painted environments and texts continued alongside canvases. [4].
The Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925. Kandinsky published Point and Line to Plane in 1926, developing an account of elementary visual relations. Ideas for the book had roots in earlier years, but its publication belongs to the Bauhaus period. Several Circles, also 1926, is a useful companion: circles of different sizes and colours appear against a dark ground, producing movement and depth through relation rather than through a depicted place. The painting does not simply illustrate a page of the book. Theory and practice informed each other without making one a code for the other. [1].
The Dessau years did not consist only of circles and clean lines. Kandinsky varied colour, grounds, edges, scales and media. Compare a large oil painting with Leichtes or Gelb Rosa, works on paper that ask more intimate questions of balance and movement. A biography cannot catalogue them all, but these links make the point that a teacher of form remained a maker who could change course within a single decade. Gelb Rosa means “Yellow Pink”: its title identifies a colour relation, and there is no rose flower to look for in the image.
The school moved again, to Berlin, in 1932 and closed in 1933. That sequence ended a long phase of teaching and prompted another relocation. The exact year of Kandinsky's German citizenship is presented differently by institutional sources; it is not needed to explain the Bauhaus sequence and is omitted here pending stronger reconciliation. What matters for the life story is that the school and country in which he had worked for more than a decade ceased to provide the same home. [1].
Showing and collecting a transnational career
The public life of Kandinsky's work did not follow the borders of his residences. Prints could circulate through books and portfolios; paintings appeared in exhibitions; people in several countries collected and interpreted what they saw. The Blue Rider's own exhibitions and almanac were ways to present a shared argument to a public. At the Bauhaus, teaching brought his ideas into another kind of circulation. The Guggenheim collection later made works from different periods visible together in New York. This movement of works and ideas helps explain why an artist based successively in Munich, Moscow, Dessau and Neuilly cannot be understood through one national school. [3]; [1].
Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim's collecting relationship with Kandinsky belongs to the late Bauhaus years and the subsequent history of his reception. Institutional accounts give different exact years for an early studio visit, so the precise year is left aside here. The larger point is clear: collections assembled in Kandinsky's lifetime and later helped construct the career viewers now encounter. A museum can bring a 1908 landscape beside a 1920s geometric canvas and a late Paris work. That arrangement makes change visible, but it can also encourage a falsely tidy sequence if visitors see only selected highlights. A biography should use museum holdings as evidence while remembering that they are selections, not the whole output. [1]; [4].
Kandinsky's own movements made the record more complicated. Work left with Münter in 1914, work retained in Russia after 1921 and work made in France followed different paths. Later catalogues and bequests have brought more of that material into view. This is more than an archival footnote: it changes what a writer can responsibly claim about an artistic transition. An argument based only on a few reproduced oils can overlook a group of drawings or a variant print. The growing record can revise chronology without diminishing the achievement.
Neuilly-sur-Seine and the final decade
Kandinsky and Nina moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, in late 1933. This was another new working environment rather than a simple return to an earlier Paris stay. The Centre Pompidou account describes a relatively secluded life there. That description need not make the work seem withdrawn or diminished. Kandinsky continued to paint and to experiment with materials, surfaces and imagery. Some forms appear small and organic, while others retain a geometric tension. The variety is more revealing than saying his late paintings all took one direction. [1].
The Neuilly studio was neither detached from the past nor completely closed to other people. The Centre Pompidou holds correspondence with figures including Christian Zervos and Kandinsky's nephew Alexandre Kojève, as well as studio material later preserved by Nina. Such records reveal ongoing conversations across art, publication and family life. They also show the limits of a biography written only from finished pictures. A painting tells us what forms were placed on its surface; letters and archives may explain an exhibition, a planned publication or the conditions under which the artist worked. Neither kind of evidence should be made to say more than it can support. In this final decade, even the word “Paris” can blur the practical specificity of a home and studio in Neuilly-sur-Seine. [1].
Composition IX, dated 1936, and Composition X, dated 1939, carry the ambitious title used earlier in his career while looking different from the pre-war canvases and from each other. Sky Blue, 1940, scatters small forms across a blue field. A reader can move among these works without assuming a neat progression toward one final style. The change of grounds and scale lets Kandinsky test fresh relations of colour, line and space. His long interest in what a form might do beyond representing an object was still active. [1].
Kandinsky became a French citizen in 1939, according to the Pompidou chronology. The Second World War then narrowed possibilities in France. The museum records his last large canvas in 1942 and subsequent focus on smaller works on cardboard. Scale can change because circumstances change; it can also open different formal possibilities. The date should not be turned into a claim that ambition ended with the large canvas. Kandinsky died on 13 December 1944 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the suburb where he had lived and worked for his final decade. [1].
Relationships without a single-school story
The life crosses groups and institutions, but none can stand for every year of work. In Munich, Münter, Marc and others shared exhibitions and debates. The correspondence with Schönberg placed painting beside music without making the two practices identical. In the Bauhaus, colleagues including Klee gave Kandinsky a school in which to teach and compare methods. Nina shared his later migrations and preserved the Neuilly studio after his death. These relationships belong to different settings and had different meanings. Joining them in one vague category of “influence” would hide the actual exchanges. [1]; [2].
Münter's role particularly needs care. She was part of the artistic network in Murnau, with her own practice and choices. Kandinsky left works with her when he departed Germany in 1914; her 1957 gift later gave Munich a major collection. That later custodial act is historically important, but describing only the gift would erase her art and her contribution to the earlier circle. Likewise Marc's collaboration in the Blue Rider initiative was real but brief before the war. Biography gains precision when each relationship is tied to a time, a project and a source. [1]; [2].
Kandinsky's own writing gives another kind of evidence, though a theoretical text is not a diary of every decision in a studio. Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Point and Line to Plane were written in different circumstances and directed at different questions. Read alongside actual paintings, they help clarify the problems Kandinsky chose to discuss. They do not remove the need to look at a work's material, version and date. A museum's object record can overturn a convenient story; a letter can reveal a concern without proving that a later picture illustrates it.
After Kandinsky: collections and a changing reputation
After 1944 Kandinsky's art continued to move through collections, exhibitions and scholarship. Münter's 1957 gift to Munich and Nina Kandinsky's later bequest of the Neuilly studio to the Centre Pompidou preserved different parts of the record. The Guggenheim became another major centre for collecting and exhibiting his work. This dispersed history explains why a researcher may have to compare records from Munich, Paris, New York, Russia and elsewhere to identify a particular painting, print or drawing. It also explains why familiar reproductions cannot be treated as a complete map of the oeuvre. [1].
The old phrase “father of abstract art” captures a part of Kandinsky's standing but may obscure the collaborations and the long process that made it possible. His works did not all become abstract at once. Some never gave up a visible subject. Others used apparently elementary geometry without abandoning colour's emotional and spatial force. His career joins changes of country and institution to changes of scale, medium and pictorial language. The paintings are compelling because they keep testing that relationship, not because one disputed date can settle the whole history of abstraction.
For a closer look, compare the 1903 rider, the Murnau Blue Mountain, Impression III (Concert), a Moscow city view, the Bauhaus Composition VIII and Sky Blue from the final period. Each page starts with an exact object. Together they make the life more concrete than a single label can.
Four stages of Kandinsky’s career
Moscow and Russia
War and revolution changed his working conditions; he made important works on paper while taking part in new cultural institutions. [1]
Bauhaus Germany
He taught in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, continued to make art in several media and published Point and Line to Plane. [1]
Neuilly near Paris
Kandinsky and Nina made a new home near Paris; he continued to work across scales and forms until his final years. [1]
Kandinsky artworks directory
Frequently Asked Questions
He was born in Moscow in 1866 and spent part of his childhood in Odessa. He later lived and worked in Germany, Russia and France. [1].
He studied law and political economy in Moscow and pursued an academic path before choosing art. He moved to Munich in 1896, near the age of thirty, for artistic training. [1].
No. He and Franz Marc developed the initiative in 1911 within a wider network that included Gabriele Münter and other artists. It involved exhibitions and an almanac rather than a single shared style. [2].
No. He made drawings and watercolours, some paintings and studies, and worked in cultural institutions. Large canvases were fewer, but the Moscow years were not an artistic void. [1].
He began in 1922 in Weimar. The school moved to Dessau in 1925 and Berlin in 1932, closing in 1933. Its original founding in 1919 predates Kandinsky's appointment. [1].
He and Nina settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris in late 1933. Kandinsky died there on 13 December 1944. [1].
Discussion
Which change in Kandinsky’s life helps you understand a particular work?
Choose a work and describe what its place, date or working conditions add to what you can see.
Reader Insights
Compare one Munich or Murnau work with a Moscow, Bauhaus or Neuilly work.
Which collaborator or institution changed the opportunities available to Kandinsky?
Which part of the life would benefit from a more precise letter, date or object record?
Join the Conversation
Share a close observation and the source that helps place it in Kandinsky’s life.
References
- Centre Pompidou, “Vassily Kandinsky”: biography, work survey and chronological landmarks. View source.
- Lenbachhaus, “The Blue Rider” and Kandinsky collection record. View source 1 · View source 2.
- Museum of Modern Art, Kandinsky in the German Expressionism collection. View source.
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Kandinsky teaching materials. View source.
- Lenbachhaus, The Golden Sail object record and Impression III (Concert) object record. View source 1 · View source 2.
- Italian Ministry of Culture catalogue, 1916 Kandinsky study in Milan. View source.
- Guggenheim, Around the Circle press kit. View source.
- Lenbachhaus, Reitendes Paar. View source.
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