Wassily Kandinsky

(1866 - 1944)

Wassily Kandinsky was already a successful legal scholar when he discovered Monet’s paintings of haystacks; he abandoned his academic career and moved to Munich to study art. After the Russian Revolution, he helped set up the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow, but, at odds with the Bolsheviks, he moved back to Germany. For the latter half of the 1920s, he lived next door to Paul Klee in a home designed by Walter Gropius. The two artists taught and studied painting at the Bauhaus until the Nazis shut down the institute and destroyed much of their work.