Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky - (1866 - 1944) was a Russian
painter, and art theorist. He is credited with painting the
first modern abstract works. Kandinsky was born in Moscow and
spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of
Moscow and chose to study law and economics. Quite successful in
his profession he was offered a professorship at the University
of Dorpat. Kandinsky started painting studies at the age of 30.
In 1896, he settled in Munich and studied first in the private
school of Anton Azbe and then at the Academy of Fine Arts,
Munich. He went back to Moscow in 1914, after World War I
started. He was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in
Moscow and returned to Germany in 1921. There, he taught at the
Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis
closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived the
rest of his life, and became a French citizen in 1939. "Colour
is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with
its many chords. The ar