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  • Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings.

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • Everything starts from a dot.

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires and autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • Color is a power which directly influences the soul.

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural... The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and... stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to 'walk about' into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • There is no must in art because art is free.

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul.

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife, and I made them sing with all the intensity I could...

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these 'walls around art.'

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • An empty canvas is a living wonder... far lovelier than certain pictures.

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • The more frightening the world becomes... the more art becomes abstract.

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • In every painting a whole is mysteriously enclosed, a whole life of tortures, doubts, of hours of enthusiasm and inspiration.

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • In every painting a whole is mysteriously enclosed, a whole life of tortures, doubts, of hours of enthusiasm and inspiration.

    — Wassily Kandinsky

  • I really believe that I am the first and only artist to throw not just the 'subject' out of my paintings, but every 'object' as well.

    — Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was a Russian-born painter, wood-engraver, lithographer, teacher, and theorist—a pioneer of abstract art. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky studied law and economics at the University of Moscow, where he lectured after graduation. In 1896, he declined a teaching position and moved to Munich to study art with Anton Azbe, and later at the Kunstakademie with Franz von Stuck. In 1901, Kandinsky founded his first artist group, Phalanx, which opened a school the following year. Kandinsky taught painting and drawing for two years there, and found a long-term companion (until 1916) in student Gabriele Münter. In 1902, Kandinsky exhibited for the first time with the Berlin Secession and produced his first woodcuts. In 1903 and 1904, he began his travels in Italy, the Netherlands, and North Africa and his visits to Russia. He began showing regularly at the Salon d’Automne in Paris beginning in 1904. Russian folk art and fairy tales inspired the artist’s paintings and woodcuts during this time; he was also painting landscape studies directly from nature. In 1908, Kandinsky returned to Munich, where he developed rich, Fauve-like contrasts of color and slowly began to eliminate the representational elements from his paintings, composing instead with increasingly abstract colors and shapes.

In 1909, Kandinsky was elected president of the newly formed New Artists Association of Munich (NKVM), which would have two exhibitions before Kandinsky and Franz Marc left to found the Blue Rider group in 1911. In 1911, Kandinsky published his famous artist treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and in 1912, the first Blue Rider Almanac, which Kandinsky had wanted to produce to stimulate discussion among different genres and artists, was published. Kandinsky had his first one-man exhibition that same year at the Galerie Hans Goltz, Neue Kunst in Munich. In 1913, one of Kandinsky’s works was included in the Armory Show in New York and the First German Autumn Salon at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin.

From 1914 to 1921, beginning with the outbreak of World War I, Kandinsky resided in Russia, where he was a member of the People’s Commissariat of Education and was appointed to numerous other cultural posts. He returned to Berlin in 1921 and was offered a teaching position at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922. At this time, he was highly regarded in Germany as a pioneering abstractionist and theoretician. In 1923, he had his first solo show in New York; the artist never visited the States, but his popularity among collectors, galleries, and museums continued to flourish. He moved with the Bauhaus to Dessau in 1925. There he began to work with precise, geometrical forms and published Point and Line to Plane in 1926. The Nazi government closed the Bauhaus in 1933, and later that year, Kandinsky settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, where he continued to paint. The Nazis confiscated fifty-seven of the artist’s works in the 1937 purge of “degenerate art.” Kandinsky died on December 13, 1944, in Neuilly.