Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944) was an important Russian artist and art theorist. He is regarded as a leader in avant-garde art among the founders of pure abstraction in art in early 20th century. Wassily played a major role in the art movement, around 1910, which freed art from representational services. He is also the pioneer of abstract movement, with a lot of loyal fans as well as art lovers, adoring his art as a painter, in addition to being an abstract creator of amazing pieces.
Wassily was born on December 16, 1866, in Moscow, Russia. His father was a excellent Russian businessman and his mother was a housewife. Young wassily had a cheerful childhood traveling around Europe together with his parents residing in Odessa and Moscow. In Kandinsky's early age, he learned arts and music, played piano and cello. He had the talent of synaesthesia cognate with that of composer Alexander Scriabin, and also writer Vladimir Nabokov, which allowed him to hear colors and to see sounds. Wassily wrote: "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul."
He received Law degree from the Moscow University and lectured at the Moscow Faculty of Law until 1896, then get a job at a Moscow publishing and printing company. Kandinsky changed his life and career totally while he was 30. He lived in Munich from 1896-1914 where he learned art anatomy, sketching and composition under Anthon Azbe for a couple of years. During 1897-1900, he studied in Munich Academy of Art and completed the course of Franz von Schtucke. He set up "Falanga" artistic movement and school in 1901, there Wassily also shared his thoughts in art. During those times his artworks represented his earlier veiws from observing the Russian folk art along with his musical innovation. He created his style based on his Synaesthetic skill which targeted more on selection of colors than traditional details. His works of art from that time, such as "The Blue Rider" (1903), are ways to creating of the modern abstract art.
Kandinsky thought that overall abstraction provided the possibility for deep, transcendental expression as well as as copying from nature only interfered within this process. Extremely motivated to create art which communicated a universal feeling of spirituality, he created a pictorial language that just freely associated with the outside world, but conveyed a lot about the artist's inner experience. Kandinsky's visual vocabulary developed through three phases, changing from his early, representative canvases with divine symbolism to his rapturous and operatic compositions, to his late, geometric and biomorphic flat planes of color. His art and thoughts influenced numerous generations of painters.
Wassily Kandinsky died in this studio in France on December 13, 1944.
Kandinsky's most popular oil painting reproductions including:
Composition VI
Composition VII
Composition VIII
Yellow-Red-Blue
On White II (1923)
Color Study. Squares with Concentric Circles
Composition X (1939)
