Vasily Kandinsky

Wassily (Vasily) Kandinsky was a Moscow-born painter and art theorist widely credited as a pioneer of abstract art. After abandoning a law career, he studied painting in Munich and co-founded the Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group with Franz Marc in 1911, developing a visual language of color, line and shape freed from representational subject matter. He taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 until its 1933 closure by the Nazis, after which he settled in France and became a French citizen in 1939.