Vasily Vasil’evič Kandinsky, also known by the Germanized form of Wassily Kandinsky, stands as the pioneering figure in the realm of abstract painting. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky’s spent his childhood between Munich and Odessa where, at an aunt’s house, he began to learn the fundamentals of drawing. After completing his law degree in Moscow, Kandinsky returned to Munich in 1896. He enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, where he also taught painting courses introducing the French avant-garde to an artistic environment devoted primarily to the Jugendstil. The works produced by Kandinsky during those years were still entirely figurative: landscapes, fantastic themes from the Russian folk tradition or German Middle Ages’s legends.
In 1902, he exhibited for the first time with The Berlin Secession and two years later at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. The first abstract watercolor dates from 1910 and is now at the Centre Georges Pompidou. From then on, Kandinsky abandoned figurative painting for good. The following year he created IV Composition, an abstract work preserved at the Tate Modern in London, and Impression III: Concert. As the title suggests, the painting was inspired by a concerto by Arnold Shönberg and is now in the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich.
It is common to approach Kandinsky’s abstract painting by emphasizing its obvious relationship to music, examining works that have been collected hereunder in groups of titles:  Impressions, Improvisations e Compositions. The first group comprises paintings in which, somehow, a mark, a recognizable impression of nature and external forms has remained. Le Improvisations are works made out of spurts of the artist’s intimate creativity. Lastly, the Compositions are the result of Kandinsky’s deliberate study and meticulous articulation of form and color. In 1912, with fellow artist Franz Marc, Kandinsky laid the foundation for the Blaue Reiter, by publishing the movement’s almanac and opening that same year the group’s first exhibition at Munich’s Thannhauser Gallery. That year, Kandinsky also published The Spiritual in Art, a fundamental philosophical text on the relationship between form and color, theorized based on the works the artist was painting in those years. Meanwhile, he held an exhibition at the Hans Goltz Gallery in Russia and a solo show at Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin.
In 1913, when Kandinsky created Black Lines, he embarked on a new artistic direction. Rather than beginning with a clearly identifiable subject, he explored the autonomy of line itself, making it the abstract subject of the work. That year, he also exhibited at the New York Armory Show before returning to Russia as World War I began, where he stayed until 1921. Between 1922 and 1923, Kandinsky served as a teacher of wall decoration at the Bauhaus school, initially in Weimar and later in Dessau. During this time, he also published a new essay titled Point and Line on the Plane In 1937, amidst the first Degenerate Art Exhibition organized by the Nazi regime in Munich, fifty of Kandinsky’s works were included. The following year, he participated in the Abstracte Kunst exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1942, two years before his death, he completed his final large canvas Tensions délicates.
We have not yet mentioned Kandinsky’s ongoing exploration of theatrical research throughout his life, which resulted in works where form, sound, color, light, and movement merged to create a new form of total art. One of his early works in this realm was Paradiesgarten and Daphnis und Chloe, created between 1908 and 1909. This was followed by a series of stage compositions from 1909 to 1914, including Yellow Sound, Green Sound, Black and White, and Purple. Nevertheless, Kandinsky’s only successful staging endeavor was Paintings from an Exhibition, which was based on the musical poem by Modest Petrovič Musorgsky. It premiered in 1928 at the Friedrich Theater in Dessau. Musorgsky’s piece was originally conceived as a virtual tour of an art exhibition featuring watercolors by Kandinsky’s friend, Viktor Aleksandrovič Hartmann. It consists of two main parts: Promenades, representing the visitor’s movements through the gallery, and Paintings, depicting the contents of the artworks on display.
Kandinsky’s works were instead staged by others. Yellow sound, for example, was made by Jacques Polieri in 1975, by Ian Strasfogel in 1982, by the Solari-Vanzi company in 1985, and by Fabrizio Crisafulli in 2002.  Viola was brought to the Venice Biennale in 1984 by Giulio Turcato and again, on the initiative of the Sprengel Museum and the Verein Kunst und Bühne in Hanover, was proposed by Kirsten Winter in 1996.