Wassily Kandinsky

Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944), Russian painter and theorist, widely regarded as one of the originators of abstract art. Influenced by fauvism in postimpressionist Paris, his early work aimed at pure aesthetic expression by using bursts of color in nonrepresentational paintings. He was a founder, along with Paul Klee, of the Blaue Reiter art movement in Munich (1911; named for his own painting, Le cavalier bleu, “The Blue Rider”). He studied the psychology of color and its effects in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912) and expressed his viewpoint on art and color in The Art of Spiritual Harmony (1914). Geometric compositions came into play in his paintings of the 1920s, at which time he also joined the faculty of the Bauhaus design school in Weimar (1922–33).