Wassily Kandinsky

Kandinsky was thirty and lecturing in law and economics at Moscow University when he gave it up to study painting in Munich. He said later that two things pushed him: a Monet haystack he could not identify as a haystack, and a performance of Wagner.

The early Munich pictures are recognisably of things, horses and riders and hills, painted in colours that have already stopped behaving realistically. By around 1911 the subject has begun to dissolve. That year he published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which argues that colour and form can work on a viewer the way music does, without depicting anything at all. He and Franz Marc founded Der Blaue Reiter in the same period.

War sent him back to Russia, where he taught and helped organise the new Soviet art institutions before falling out with the constructivists. The Bauhaus years in Germany produced the tightest, most geometric work of his career, circles and grids and hard diagonals. When the Nazis closed the school he moved to Paris, where he painted until he died in 1944.