Portrait of Wassily Kandinsky Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky Painting Reproductions 4 of 7

1866-1944

Russian Expressionist Painter

He was born in Moscow on December 4 (December 16, New Style) 1866, into a family whose genealogy read like a map of the Russian empire’s borders: a Muscovite mother, a father from Kyakhta near China, a great-grandmother reputedly a Mongolian princess. This mixed heritage mattered less as romantic myth than as an early lesson that cultures could overlap and refract one another. Childhood journeys to Venice, Rome, Florence, the Caucasus, and the Crimea gave him a cosmopolitan eye before adolescence had fixed his tastes. In Odessa from 1871, he learned piano and cello, handling sound with the same intensity he would later attribute to colour, which for him had “a mysterious life of its own.”

In 1886 he chose law and economics at the University of Moscow, dutifully pursuing a profession that seemed more permissible in Russian society than art. Yet the city’s chromatic architecture and its icon collections pressed on his imagination. An ethnographic mission to Vologda in 1889 exposed him to folk art whose stylizations liberated form from perspective and naturalism. In St. Petersburg he confronted Rembrandt, in Paris the latest salons. By 1893 he had a doctoral-level degree, but the compromise of directing a photographic section at a printing establishment could not silence his conviction. When a professorship at Dorpat beckoned in 1896, he chose instead the uncertain path to Munich, calling it his “now or never” moment.

Munich offered anonymity and discipline. He studied with Anton Azbé, then with Franz von Stuck at the Academy, earning a diploma in 1900. His public face - tall, impeccably dressed, pince-nez poised - gave him the air of a diplomat or scientist. The paintings of these years tested Impressionism, Jugendstil’s sinuous lines, Neo-Impressionist dots, and the saturated chromatics of Expressionism and Fauvism. He showed with the Phalanx group (presiding over it from 1902), the Berlin Sezession, the Paris Salons, and Die Brücke in Dresden. Between 1903 and 1908 he traveled constantly, from Holland to Tunisia, absorbing atmospheres and palettes, always returning to experiment with what he had seen.

In 1909, with Gabriele Münter, his companion since 1902, he bought a house in Murnau, where alpine light fractured forms into planes of burning colour. There he pursued a language in which line and hue could operate free from the obligation to resemble. He was never a hedonist of paint alone, nor an advocate of art as decorative self-sufficiency. He wanted a painting that could, like music, articulate immaterial states. The parallel with music was not novel, yet his insistence on constructing a visual grammar of sensations gave the analogy new urgency.

The trajectory toward abstraction was neither solitary nor uncontested. Blue Mountain (1908–09) and Landscape with Tower (1909) incline toward nonrepresentation, their imagery compressed into symbols and their compositions edging toward explosion. The oft-cited First Abstract Watercolour, dated 1910, is more accurately placed later, near Composition VII of 1913. As others dismantled representation - the Cubists, for instance - Kandinsky’s contribution was not mere precedence but a relentless argument for painting as a spiritual language. Works such as With the Black Arch (1912), Autumn II (1912), and Black Lines (1913) were executed with a slashing velocity that would echo decades later in New York studios.

Institutionally, he helped found the Neue Künstlervereinigung in 1909, then, after disputes, formed Der Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc in 1911. The catalogue and almanac they produced were less a manifesto than a statement of affinities across epochs and geographies, from folk art to children’s drawings. The group dissolved with the onset of World War I, reminding him that artistic communities do not stand outside history’s convulsions.

In 1914, as war erupted, he returned to Russia, ending his relationship with Münter. An earlier marriage to a cousin had been formally dissolved in 1910; in 1917 he married Nina Andreevskaya. The new Soviet government courted avant-garde artists, and he accepted positions that would have been unthinkable under the old regime. Between 1918 and 1921 he became professor at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts, a member of the People’s Commissariat for Public Instruction, founder of the Institute of Artistic Culture, director of the Museum for Pictorial Culture, and a driving force behind the establishment of museums across the country. Yet as Social Realism hardened state policy, he realized the limits of his vision under the new orthodoxy and left for Berlin at the year’s end.

By 1922 he was teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar. The school’s programme, dedicated to architecture and applied arts, did not at first encourage easel painting, yet he found an intellectual laboratory. His courses on form and colour, and his leadership of the mural workshop, synthesized pedagogy and practice. After the move to Dessau in 1925, he gained a class in free painting. His own canvases shifted toward geometric clarity without losing the tension of energised space. Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (1926) analysed the expressive temperature of points, lines, and planes - horizontal as cool, vertical as hot - extending his earlier reflections in Concerning the Spiritual in Art from colours to the grammar of drawing.

In 1933, forced out when the Nazis closed the Bauhaus, he left Germany. A German citizen since 1928, he took refuge in Paris, naturalized in 1939. Development in Brown, austere and resonant, can be read as a commentary on the brown-shirted militias. The Paris years produced paintings he called “concrete,” preferring a term that suggested built sign-systems rather than negation by abstraction. The imagery settled into biomorphic signs, half-formed organisms, eclipsed faces, and glyphs that feel like scripts awaiting decipherment. Tempered Élan (1944), among his last works, exemplifies this pictographic synthesis of the organic and the geometric.

He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine on December 13, 1944. His legacy - often absorbed through more approachable successors and adapted to diverse schools - persists as much in his writings as in his images. He insisted that painting could be more than representation and more than decoration, a disciplined arena for exploring inner necessity. That insistence, articulated across continents and regimes, remains his most persuasive biography.

160 Kandinsky Paintings

Summer Landscape, 1909 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Summer Landscape 1909

Oil Painting
$600
Canvas Print
$56.39
SKU: KAW-16146
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 33 x 45 cm
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Murnau, Houses in the Obermarkt, 1908 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Murnau, Houses in the Obermarkt 1908

Oil Painting
$671
Canvas Print
$65.74
SKU: KAW-16147
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 64.5 x 50.2 cm
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain

An Arab Town, 1905 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

An Arab Town 1905

Oil Painting
$1123
Canvas Print
$57.66
SKU: KAW-16148
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 67.3 x 99.5 cm
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Sky Blue, 1940 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Sky Blue 1940

Oil Painting
$1129
Canvas Print
$62.31
SKU: KAW-16149
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 100 x 73 cm
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Around the Line, 1943 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Around the Line 1943

Oil Painting
$698
Canvas Print
$61.22
SKU: KAW-16150
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 42 x 57.8 cm
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain

In the Bright Oval, 1925 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

In the Bright Oval 1925

Oil Painting
$890
Canvas Print
$68.53
SKU: KAW-16151
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 73 x 59 cm
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain

Picture with Three Spots, No. 196, 1914 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Picture with Three Spots, No. 196 1914

Oil Painting
$1293
Canvas Print
$78.16
SKU: KAW-16152
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 121 x 111 cm
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain

The Ludwigskirche in Munich, 1908 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

The Ludwigskirche in Munich 1908

Oil Painting
$1052
Canvas Print
$60.92
SKU: KAW-16153
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 67.3 x 96 cm
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain

A Motley Life, 1907 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

A Motley Life 1907

Oil Painting
$1332
Canvas Print
$56.79
SKU: KAW-16154
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 130 x 162.5 cm
Public Collection

Improvisation 3, 1909 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Improvisation 3 1909

Oil Painting
$1120
Canvas Print
$61.39
SKU: KAW-16155
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 94 x 130 cm
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Impression III (Concert), 1911 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Impression III (Concert) 1911

Oil Painting
$1029
Canvas Print
$56.49
SKU: KAW-16156
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 77.5 x 100 cm
Public Collection

Impression V (Park), 1911 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Impression V (Park) 1911

Oil Painting
$1047
Canvas Print
$57.66
SKU: KAW-16157
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 106 x 157.5 cm
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Improvisation 19, 1911 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Improvisation 19 1911

Oil Painting
$1208
Canvas Print
$61.53
SKU: KAW-16158
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 120 x 141.5 cm
Public Collection

Improvisation 21A, 1911 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Improvisation 21A 1911

Oil Painting
$1247
Canvas Print
$67.16
SKU: KAW-16159
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 96 x 105 cm
Public Collection

Lyrically, 1911 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Lyrically 1911

Oil Painting
$1068
Canvas Print
$62.48
SKU: KAW-16160
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 74 x 100 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands

With the Black Arch, 1912 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

With the Black Arch 1912

Oil Painting
$1301
Canvas Print
$81.59
SKU: KAW-16161
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 189 x 198 cm
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Sketch 2 for Composition VII, 1913 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Sketch 2 for Composition VII 1913

Oil Painting
$1314
Canvas Print
$56.39
SKU: KAW-16162
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 100 x 140 cm
Public Collection

In Gray, 1919 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

In Gray 1919

Oil Painting
$1328
Canvas Print
$62.31
SKU: KAW-16163
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 129 x 176 cm
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Red Spot II, 1921 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Red Spot II 1921

Oil Painting
$1178
Canvas Print
$56.39
SKU: KAW-16164
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 137 x 181 cm
Public Collection

Movement I, 1935 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Movement I 1935

Oil Painting
$1328
SKU: KAW-16165
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 116 x 89 cm
The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

Composition IX, 1936 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Composition IX 1936

Oil Painting
$1318
Canvas Print
$56.39
SKU: KAW-16166
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 113.5 x 195 cm
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Thirty, 1937 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Thirty 1937

Oil Painting
$1242
Canvas Print
$69.00
SKU: KAW-16167
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 81 x 100 cm
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Grouping, 1937 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Grouping 1937

Oil Painting
$1613
SKU: KAW-16168
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 146 x 88 cm
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden

Various Parts, 1940 by Kandinsky | Painting Reproduction

Various Parts 1940

Oil Painting
$1497
SKU: KAW-16169
Wassily Kandinsky
Original Size: 89 x 116 cm
Public Collection

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