7 Facts About Kandinsky You Might Not Know
1.Kandinsky didn't start painting seriously until he was 30.Before that, he studied law and economics at Moscow University, graduating with honors — a professorship at the University of Dorpat was already waiting for him. But in 1896, he walked away from academia and moved to Munich to study art.
2. The decision to change his profession was heavily influenced by a French Impressionist exhibition in Moscow in 1895, where he saw Claude Monet’s Haystacks. Kandinsky recalled: "And once I saw the painting for the first time. It seemed to me that it was impossible to guess without a catalogue that it was a haystack. This lack of clarity was unpleasant to me: I thought that the painter had no right to paint so unclearly. It was a vague feeling that there was no object in the painting. I noticed with surprise and confusion that the painting not only gripped me but printed ineradicably on my memory, and suddenly arose in my mind down to the last detail. <...> But deep at the back of my mind, the object was discredited as a necessary element of the painting."
3. Kandinsky is often called a "pioneer of abstraction." In fact, he moved in this direction alongside Hilma af Klint, Mondrian, Malevich, Picabia, and others. In the early 1910s, there was a general urge in painting to break the boundaries of figurative art, as seen in the works of many artists. Kandinsky, however, was the one who theorized the existence of art beyond those boundaries.
4. Kandinsky married Nina Andreevskaya in 1917. In the same year, their son Vsevolod was born. Tragically, the boy died at the age of three in 1920. After this tragedy, Kandinsky never spoke about his son in public again.
5. Kandinsky is widely associated with synesthesia — a form of perception in which one sense triggers another. He knew about the phenomenon and believed art should appeal to multiple senses, not just sight.
6. Several of Kandinsky's paintings, along with hundreds of other artists' works, were confiscated by the Nazis during their campaign against avant-garde art. They were later presented to the public as part of the infamous "Degenerate Art" exhibition, first staged in Munich in 1937 and subsequently toured until 1941.
7. Kandinsky's most expensive painting is Church in Murnau (Murnau mit Kirche), 1910 It was sold on March 1, 2023.
