Improvisation 19

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Russia 1866. He was one of the most important pioneers of abstract art, abandoning a promising university career teaching law to travel to Munich in 1896 to study painting. His pictures combined features of Art Nouveau with his memories of Russian folk art, to which he added a fauve-like intensity of colour.

His move towards abstraction began with his philosophy about the nature of art, influenced by theosophy and mysticism. He did not reject representation, but held that the ‘pure’ artist seeks to express ‘inner’ feelings and ignores the superficial. He was one of the most active figures in the Blaue Reiter group and also took up a teaching post in 1921 in the Bauhaus until it was closed in 1933. He died in 1944.