1866 -1944 · Munich, Russia, Bauhaus and abstract invention

Sound colors, lines in tension and autonomous shapes make Kandinsky one of the great inventors of modern abstraction.

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866 and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944. Trained in law and economics, he abandoned an academic career at the age of twenty-nine to study painting in Munich. Russian folk arts, music, symbolism and color of Monet encouraged him to seek an image that no longer depended on the description of the visible world. The Blue Rider still preserves mountains, horses and landscapes, but color already acquired an autonomous force there. In 1911, with Franz Marc, Kandinsky founded the Blaue Reiter's Almanac and published On the Spiritual in Art, where he compared the interior effects of colors and shapes to those of music. His Improvisations and Compositions become the laboratories of this new painting. Composition VII, produced in 1913 after numerous studies, organizes a whirlwind of lines, colors and resonances without imposing a single story. Returning to Russia during the First World War and the Revolution, Kandinsky participated in artistic institutions before returning to Germany. From 1922, he taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Dessau then Berlin. Composition VIII and Yellow-Red-Blue then showed precise geometry: circles, diagonals, grids and colored surfaces nevertheless retained a significant tension. The closure of the Bauhaus by the Nazis in 1933 took him to France. In Neuilly, his latest works combine softer colors and biomorphic shapes. Painter, theorist, teacher, engraver and poet, Kandinsky transforms abstraction into spiritual and experimental language. The "Wassily Kandinsky" selection notably compares Composition VII and Yellow-red-blue. His reading favors composition.

Kandinsky releases painting as music already is: color, line and rhythm can move without telling or imitating.