KunstenaarRussian, German
Wassily Kandinsky
2 actieve items
Kandinsky came to painting late, and the delay may have sharpened his sense of purpose. He was 30 years old, practising law in Moscow, when a visit to an exhibition of French Impressionists in 1895 unsettled him - a Monet haystack, he wrote, appeared to him divorced from its subject, pure colour and form generating an emotional charge independent of any recognisable thing. He left for Munich the following year.
Born on 16 December 1866 in Moscow to a tea merchant's family, Vasily Vasilyevich Kandinsky studied law and economics at Moscow University before emigrating to Bavaria. In Munich he trained first at Anton Azbe's private school, then at the Academy of Fine Arts. By 1901 he had founded Phalanx, an exhibiting group, and was teaching. A decade of travel across Europe with the German artist Gabriele Munter followed, with the couple eventually settling in Murnau at the foot of the Alps. These years produced landscapes of increasing abstraction and, in 1911, a group exhibition with Franz Marc under the name Der Blaue Reiter - a loose coalition that also produced the almanac of the same name, a document that argued for the spiritual unity of all the arts.
In 1910 Kandinsky published "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" (Uber das Geistige in der Kunst), the foundational text of abstract painting. He argued that colour and form carried psychological and spiritual weight independent of representational content - that a painting could function as a composer functions: building inner necessity from pure material. His own canvases in this period moved from near-abstract landscapes toward fully non-objective work, the Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions series. Composition VII (1913), painted in a single day after months of preparation, remains among the most complex abstract paintings of the twentieth century.
World War I forced him back to Moscow in 1914. After the Russian Revolution he engaged briefly with cultural administration under Lunacharsky, helping establish the Museum of the Culture of Painting. But his spiritual approach to art increasingly conflicted with Soviet materialism, and in 1920 he returned to Germany. He joined the Bauhaus in 1922 and taught there for over a decade - first in Weimar, then Dessau - developing systematic colour theory and teaching the foundational course alongside Paul Klee. His 1922 print portfolio "Kleine Welten" (Small Worlds), twelve works combining etching, woodcut, and lithography, was among the first Bauhaus publications. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, he moved to Paris, where he spent his final decade painting biomorphic forms of increasing delicacy. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 13 December 1944.
On Auctionist, Kandinsky appears in 23 lots across Swedish and Danish auction houses. The top sale is "Kleine Welten VI" at Garpenhus Auktioner, which achieved 10,160 EUR. Most other lots are after-prints and reproductions in the low hundreds to low thousands of kronor range - a reflection of how widely his imagery has been reproduced in offset lithography and facsimile editions.