Vasily Kandinsky

A pioneer of abstract art, Vasily Kandinsky believed that color and form could function as vehicles for direct expression, awakening powerful feelings in the viewer. He argued that the emotional properties of abstract art could transcend language and that images don’t need to represent something identifiable in order to be powerful.

Having received musical training early in his life, Kandinsky approached color with a musician’s sensibility, often analogizing color to sound. In his seminal 1912 text, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, one of the most important and widely read art treatises of the 20th century, he advocated that art could move beyond imitation of the physical world, inspiring, as he put it, “vibrations in the soul.” He wrote, “Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.”

During the first decade of the 20th century, Kandinsky’s work showed influences of Fauvism, pointillism, and Impressionism, but he soon began forging a new path alongside artists that shared his radical sensibility. As one of the founding members of the New Artists’ Association of Munich (Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen, or NKVM), the leading movement of Modern Art in 20th-century Germany, he created works that were increasingly abstract. In 1911, Kandinsky brought together the Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) group, nine like-minded Expressionist artists who believed that symbolic associations of sound and color in art could produce a spiritual experience. Famously, he began teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922, where he made color theory a significant part of the school’s curriculum. Following the Nazi government’s closure of the Bauhaus in 1933, Kandinsky settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, where he resided until his death.

The Art Institute is home to numerous works by Kandinsky, including Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons), notable for its incorporation of both abstract forms and references to the material world.