Vasilij Kandinskij

Wassily Kandinsky came to painting late and by choice. He was born in Moscow in 1866, trained as a lawyer, did well enough to be offered a university professorship in Roman law, and then at 30 turned it all down to move to Munich and learn to paint. He later pointed to two jolts that pushed him: a Monet haystack he could barely read as a haystack, and a Wagner opera that filled his head with colours while he listened.

That last part was no figure of speech. Kandinsky seems genuinely to have experienced sound as colour and colour as sound, and he came to believe a painting could work on a viewer the way music does, without needing to show any recognisable object at all. Around 1910 he began making some of the first purely abstract pictures in European art, canvases of floating patches and lines with titles borrowed from music, like Composition and Improvisation.

In 1911, with the painter Franz Marc, he founded a Munich circle called the Blue Rider, loosely bound by the idea that art should reach for the spiritual. The First World War scattered it and sent Kandinsky back to Russia. He returned to Germany in the 1920s to teach at the Bauhaus, the famous design school, where his shapes grew tighter and more geometric, full of circles and hard angles. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus and branded his work degenerate, he left for Paris. He died just outside it, in Neuilly, in 1944.