Russian-born painter and theorist, typically credited — though the claim is contested with Hilma af Klint and Malevich — as the inventor of abstract painting, and the author of two of the foundational theoretical books of 20th-century modernism: Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1911) and Point and Line to Plane (Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, 1926). Kandinsky came to painting late, abandoning a law and economics career at thirty for the Munich art world, organized the Blaue Reiter almanac and exhibitions with Klee and Franz Marc in 1911–12, and produced, by 1913, the first fully non-representational oil paintings of the modern period.
Concerning the Spiritual in Art argues that the arts are moving — inevitably, spiritually — toward the condition of music: a direct address to the soul through color and form, freed from the obligation to represent the external world. The book is more theosophical than art-critical in its language (Blavatsky's influence is direct, and uncomfortable for readers who want the book to be more modernist than mystical); it is nevertheless the single most widely read theoretical document by a 20th-century painter and was foundational for the Bauhaus. Point and Line to Plane, written at the Bauhaus and published as Bauhausbuch 9 in 1926, is the more technical book: the systematic grammar of what a point and a line and a plane do, in isolation and together, in a picture.
He taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 through its Nazi-imposed closure in 1933 and fled to Paris, where he spent the last decade in the "biomorphic" late style. The Russian years (1914–21) — during which he helped set up the new Soviet museum system before leaving for Germany — are the part of his life most transformed by post-1989 scholarship. His partnership with Klee at the Bauhaus (the two were close friends and neighbors in the Dessau "masters' houses") is the defining intellectual friendship of the school.