In 1866, Kandinsky was born in Moscow into a cultured and wealthy family. From his earliest years, he was attracted to painting, music and traditional Russian art. Kandinsky studied economics and law from 1886 to 1892. He then decided to stop and learn to paint at the age of thirty. Before the 1st World War, he joined the "Blaue Rieter" ("Blue Rider") circle with Franz Marc, a group of avant-garde expressionists, which split up when the war broke out. He painted serene abstract canvases using bright colours, but the outbreak of hostilities was followed by depressing paintings. After fleeing to a dacha in Moscow, he was unable to paint for two months, from August 1914 to January 1916, then from October 1917 to June 1919. With no studio, no exhibition plan and no exhibition project, he made sketches and watercolours that served as the basis for later works.

In 1921, fed up with the opposition of avant-garde artists, he left the USSR and volunteered to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar (school of architecture and art) and published Punkt und Linie zu Flache (Point and Line on a Plane 1926) in which he gathered his ideas on the world of forms and colours. The post-war paintings express the optimism of the renewal brought about by the Russian Revolution and his subsequent departure for Germany. They are light, playful and decorated with bold curves.

In 1933, however, painting was undermined by the Nazi regime and the artist retired to Neuilly-sur-Seine in France (he had adopted French nationality) in 1944, where he died at the age of 78. He painted masterpieces such as Black Relationship, Composition VIII, Yellow-Red-Blue and Composition VII.

Like Mondrian and Malevich, Kandinsky was one of the first theoreticians and artists of abstract painting. Furthermore, Kandinsky was the first to introduce abstract expressionism. He is certainly one of the most important artists of the first half of the 20th century. As a theorist and painter, he gave a new definition to colour and form. After his death, his wife, Nina Kandinsky, bequeathed all his works to the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, where the largest collection of his work is on display.