Collection: Art prints by Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter and is considered one of the pioneers and most important theorists of abstract art - an artist whose work and thinking changed the development of modern painting so fundamentally that his name is inextricably linked with the moment when Western art took the decisive step from depicting the visible world to creating a purely inner pictorial reality freed from representationalism. He was born in Moscow in 1866 and initially completed a degree in law and economics, which gave him the prospect of a secure academic career. It was only at the age of thirty, after an overwhelming encounter with an Impressionist exhibition in Moscow and the deep impression Monet's haystack series made on him, that he finally decided to take up painting and went to Munich, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and soon became one of the formative figures of the European avant-garde.

Kandinsky developed a conviction early on that would determine his entire future work: that color and form have their own spiritual and emotional power, independent of the representation of external objects. It was not the visible world that should appear in the picture, but the inner world - feeling, sound, vibration, spiritual energy. This idea, influenced by theosophy, by Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk and by his own synaesthesia, which enabled him to experience colors as sounds and sounds as colors, led him on a path of consistent abstraction that culminated in the first completely non-objective paintings in Western art history around 1910. These early abstract watercolors and oil paintings, in which color surfaces and lines oscillate freely in the pictorial space, marked a turning point whose significance for art history can hardly be overestimated.

From 1911, Kandinsky's artistic and theoretical activities intensified considerably. The founding of the Blaue Reiter together with Franz Marc and the publication of his fundamental theoretical work "On the Spiritual in Art" in the same year made him one of the most influential voices of the European avant-garde. A central feature of his early abstract period are the so-called impressions, improvisations and compositions - series of works that correspond to the varying degrees of spontaneity and planning in his creative process and which together convey a picture of the inner logic and spiritual aspirations of his abstraction. His large compositions of these years in particular are among the most influential works in art history and illustrate his claim to understand painting as an art related to music that has a direct effect on the viewer's inner self.

After the First World War and a formative phase in Russia, where he was involved in the development of Soviet art institutions, Kandinsky came to the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922, later in Dessau, where he worked as a teacher and systematically developed his theoretical ideas on the effect of color and form. This Bauhaus phase brought about a significant change in his style: the expressive, flowing forms of his Munich years were replaced by more geometric, constructive pictorial structures in which circles, triangles and lines are arranged with almost mathematical precision and yet develop a lively pictorial effect imbued with inner tension. After the closure of the Bauhaus by the National Socialists, Kandinsky emigrated to Paris in 1933, where he lived and worked until his death, developing an increasingly organic pictorial world populated by biomorphic forms in his late work, which added a final, surprising accent to his oeuvre.

Wassily Kandinsky died in 1944 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, leaving behind not only a painterly oeuvre of extraordinary breadth and inner consistency, but also theoretical writings that are still among the most important texts in modern art theory today. Today he is regarded as one of the central figures in 20th century art history, whose works are represented in the world's most important museums and are highly valued on the international art market, while his name stands for that revolutionary moment in which painting left representationalism behind and began to speak a new, purely pictorial language.