1866-1944. Russian painter, a pioneer of
abstract art. Born in Moscow, he travelled
widely, settling in Munich 1896. He was an
originator of the Blaue Reiter movement
1911-12. From 1921 he taught at the Bauhaus
school of design. He moved to Paris 1933,
becoming a French citizen 1939. Kandinsky
originally experimented with
Post-Impressionist styles and Fauvism. Around
1910 he produced the first known examples of
purely abstract work in 20th-century art. His
highly coloured style had few imitators, but
his theories on composition, Concerning the
Spiritual in Art 1912, were taken up by the
early abstract movement.