Wassily Kandinsky

Returning to his studio one evening he found one of his own paintings turned on its side and could not tell what it depicted. It was beautiful anyway. Kandinsky remembered that moment as the beginning of abstraction. He held that colour and form carry feeling without an object, and set the argument out in Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Taking music as his model, he titled works Composition and Improvisation. He taught at the Bauhaus until the Nazis closed it, then moved to Paris. Born in Russia and working through Germany and France, his surfaces grew steadily more geometric. He died outside Paris in 1944.