Wassily KANDINSKY
(1866-1944)

Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian-born artist, whose contributions to the world of modern art are innumerable. On an artistic level, Kandinsky's maturation process from representational art to abstract art is fascinating. From his earliest work, with an impressionistic flair, to his later work, which was pure abstraction,Kandinsky was an innovator and a genius. He bridged the gap between reality painting of earlier decades and the fantasy escapism of the twentieth century. This bridge was then used by many other artists with whom we are familiar, such as Mondrian. Kandinsky makes a wonderful study for anyone who seeks to understand the artistic changes that occured at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Politically, Kandinsky is a prime example of the turbulence in Europe in the early to mid twentieth century. Kandinsky was born in Russia, but moved to Munich to pursue his artistic career. At the outbreak of World War I, however, he found himself being persecuted as an enemy in this city that had previously accepted him. He fled Germany and returned to Russia, where the political situation forced him to focus his art intentions on socialism, rather than pursue his own artistic creativity. After the war, Kandinsky felt safe and returned to Germany, only to be accosted and forced to flee a few years later when the Nazi's came to power. This was the plight of many artists at the time. Much of Kandinsky's work was destroyed by the Nazi's, including a group of Kandinsky's famous "Compositions".