Wassily Kandinsky: The Pioneer of Abstract Art and Color Theory 

One of the pivotal and pioneering voices of early 20th-century painting, Wassily Kandinsky introduced the art world to the power of abstraction. Carrying the non-representational revolution to its heights, Kandinsky revealed how painting was more than just pigment on canvas; instead, it could transport the viewer into an emotional, even spiritual, journey.

Join us as we investigate Kandinsky’s symphonies of color in this article on his life and work. We’ll highlight key landmarks in his career while also showcasing essential paintings that helped secure his status as one of the most influential painters of modern art.

Wassily Kandinsky’s Formative Years

Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866 and attended school not for art but rather for economics and law. He excelled in these pursuits and even acquired a prestigious professorship in the field, but even from his early childhood he found a particular fascination with color that did not abate as the years passed. This flicker of interest burst into full flame in the late 1890s, and it was around the same time that he abandoned his career to instead become a painter. This shift was perhaps thanks to several influences. 

Impressionist Influence

In 1896, Kandinsky had the opportunity to view an exhibition of Claude Monet’s paintings, including those from Monet’s Haystacks series. Through these works Kandisky was made aware of the artistic potential of playing with brushstroke and palette. It also introduced Kandinsky to the idea of decentering the composition away from narrative in place of a celebration of light and atmosphere.

Thrill of Theosophy

Another driving force in this early phase of his career was his burgeoning interest in theosophy, a 20th-century theological perspective that emphasized universal truths that resonated across nature and humanity and gave life across the planes of existence within the world. From this view, Kandinsky imagined that even planes of colors and lines were imbued with these vivifying qualities to add a new dimensionality to artistic expression. 

Shifting Senses

Adding to this intensity was Kandinsky’s neurological condition known as synesthesia, a cross-wiring of the senses that made him capable of “hearing” colors or “seeing” the notes of music as it played. This rewiring combined with Kandinsky’s ideological and artistic influences primed him to transform painterly compositions altogether.

Kandinsky’s Evolving Abstraction

By the dawn of the 20th century, Kandinsky had developed an artistic philosophy that allowed this power of color to be at the forefront of his work. In early paintings, like Munich-Schwabing with the Church of Saint Ursula (1908), Kandinsky captured a recognizable landscape scene that nevertheless was electrified to an otherworldly state by his vibrant palette. Industrial buildings come to life in the background with bold reds and blues, while the foreground is awash with hot orange and lemon-green dabs of paint. 

Kandinsky’s technique in such early works clearly paid homage to the Impressionists – the loosened expressive strokes deconstruct the forms like the way that Monet did – but novel in this phase of Kandinsky’s work was the power of his palette. The unexpected variety of color here brought new life to his work and in some ways mirrored the work of the Fauves, like Henri Matisse, who also wished to experiment with arbitrary color combinations. For Kandinsky, however, this early hint of expressive abstraction only foreshadowed the continued innovation in colorful play to come in his work in subsequent years.

The Blue Rider and Total Abstraction

Kandinsky’s artistic vision came into even clearer focus in the 1910s, after he relocated to Murnau, Germany, and joined forces with other pioneering figures like Franz Marc to form Der Blau Reiter (“The Blue Rider”), an artistic collective for avant-garde voices. Taking its name from a 1903 painting by Kandinsky, which in turn played off a folkloric narrative of a vanguard-like figure on horseback, The Blue Rider organized exhibitions of modern art to showcase some of these new ideas and modes of expression.

During this period Kandinsky pushed further into abstraction as characterized by his paintings like Impression III (Concert) (1911) and  Composition VII (1913). In these works, Kandinsky abandoned formal and figural references to allow color and line to dance in careful choreography across each canvas. Let’s take a closer look at each painting.

Impression III (Concert)

Impression III (Concert) radiates warmth with the predominant use of bright yellow and signaled one of Kandinsky’s earliest explorations of total abstraction. Similarly in Improvisation 27, subtle washes of color combine with linework in varying weights as if to conjure a visual symphony, an allusion desired by Kandinsky as he sought to express the lyrical harmonies of color. This informs the titling of many of his works from this period. Impression III (Concert) was so named as it was rumored to have been inspired by Kandinsky’s attendance at a concert of composer Arnold Schoenberg’s music.  

Composition VII

It was around this same time that Kandinsky published his seminal treatise, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” (1911), which mapped how he saw colors corresponding to musical harmonies and symbolizing individual emotions. This latter element is perhaps most visible in Composition VII, where composition overflows with a cacophony of color and line as if it is exploding from the surface. The total compositional deconstruction of these works was groundbreaking and heralded as the dawn of abstract painting. For Kandinsky, in addition to cementing his legacy in the field of art, these paintings defined a style that would endure for the remainder of his career.

From the Bauhaus Years to Biomorphism

World War I brought an end to The Blue Rider, however, following the war Kandinsky found a new circle of intellectuals with which to work at Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus. There, working alongside innovators like Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger, Kandinsky explored a richer array of geometric forms in his abstractions. These works, like On White II (1923), suggest a distillation of color and line from previous paintings and aligned with the Bauhaus ethos of streamlined compositions. Again, let’s take a closer look at some of Kandinsky’s most iconic works from this phase of his career. 

On White II

On White II exemplifies Kandinsky’s artful embodiment of Bauhaus ideals in how he refined the precision of his forms while also continuing to allude to a profound dimensionality. The cluster of visual activity seemingly floating in an overwhelming field of white space conveyed a sense of energy that pulled the viewer into this dynamic nexus.

Several Circles

A similar energy is sensed in Several Circles (1926), which at first glance seems to relay a scattering of multicolored orbs against a deep black background. A longer look, however, recalls the universality of this motif: from as transient as sunspots that appear on a lens to as permanent as planets or stars moving through the galaxy, Kandinsky’s Several Circles showcases that even having absorbed the Bauhaus mindset Kandinsky was still committed to contemplating the universal, the timeless, and the powerful.

Various Actions

The Bauhaus too would soon fall victim to war, with Nazi forces closing the school in 1933, at which point Kandinsky decamped to Paris. There, Kandinsky’s work took a decided turn toward biomorphism. His paintings, like Various Actions (1941) showcased a sampling of seemingly minuscule organic entities as if Kandinsky was examining abstraction through a modernist’s microscope. These biomorphic works further revealed the elemental quality of Kandinsky’s painting and perhaps also showcased the ultimate breakdown of form to its most universal level. 

Kandinsky’s Long-Lasting Legacy

Kandinsky’s death in 1944 ended a remarkably dynamic career, but his paintings that embodied the momentum of modernist advance in the early 20th century continue to inspire collectors and creatives today. His embrace of color’s potential to become its own subject has equipped generations of subsequent artists to follow in his footsteps. Moreover, the freshness of his palette has only garnered increasing attention on the auction market since his demise. His painting, Murnau with Church II (1910) appeared at a Sotheby’s London auction in 2023 and set a new record for his paintings, suggesting that enthusiasm for Kandinsky is far from waning. This enduring appeal is perhaps owed to Kandinsky’s belief in art’s potential beyond the conventional representation work and its capacity to transcend the limitations of time, religion, culture, and more to get at a truly universal aesthetic.