Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (December 16 1866 – December 13 1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist who is considered to be the pioneer of abstract art. He was born in Moscow but spent his childhood in Odessa (Ukraine), attending the Grekov Odessa Art school. After graduating, he enrolled at the University of Moscow where he studied economics and law. He was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat (Estonia) where he began doing painting studies on the side as a hobby at the age of 30.

Deciding to give up a successful career teaching economics and law Kandinsky settled in Munich to study fine art in 1896. After the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914, he returned to Moscow. Following the Russian Revolution, Kandinsky helped establish the Museum of the Culture of Painting. As time went on and the idealism of the Socialist Revolution faded and was replaced by creeping authoritarianism, he realized he wasn’t a good fit within Soviet society after his view of art was rejected by the more radical members of the museum as being too individualistic and bourgeouis. In 1920 he decided to move back to Germany to teach at the Bauhaus school of Art and Architecture. He taught there until 1933 when the National Socialists closed the school down because they viewed it as being a breeding ground for degenerate art which they considered to be the antithesis of what their political party stood for. After escaping Germany along with many other teachers and artists, he settled in France where he lived the rest of his life and created some of his more well known fine art pieces.

Kandinsky was heavily influenced by Claude Monet’s impressionist paintings and use of colors.