Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as the pioneer of abstract art. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odesa (today Ukraine), where he graduated from Grekov Odesa Art school. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics.

Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat (today Tartu, Estonia)— Wassily Kandinsky began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching, and anatomy) at the age of 30.

He was not immediately accepted into the school as an art student, and so in the meantime, he began learning art by himself, gaining artistic insight from Monet’s Haystacks and Richard Wagner’s composition Lohengrin. Kandinsky was also influenced by the teachings of anthroposophy, as such, his abstract works were a creation of his intense philosophical beliefs, based on his own personal experiences with art. The devotion to inner beauty remained a central theme in his art

He taught at the Bauhaus school of architecture until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933. After the Bauhaus was closed, Wassily Kandinsky moved to Paris, where he was mostly isolated from the other Impressionist or Cubist painters. He later became a French citizen and lived the rest of his days there. His legacy lives on in the newly created Kandinsky Award, which rewards a promising young Russian artist a 55,000 euro prize, and attempts to elevate the status of contemporary Russian art.