Wassily Kandinsky
Gave up a law professorship at thirty and painted his way out of the recognisable world.
Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866, took a post teaching law, and abandoned it at thirty for art school in Munich. He wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art, founded the Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc in 1911, and produced around that year the first paintings in which the subject has genuinely gone — Improvisations and Compositions built from colour and line understood as musical rather than descriptive. He returned to Russia for the revolution, came back to teach at the Bauhaus where the work became geometric and precise, and ended in Paris, where he died in 1944.
The Munich pre-war years and the Bauhaus period are the two peaks of the market. Provenance requires attention on two fronts: Soviet-era nationalisation and dispersal, and the German confiscations of 1937, both of which affect title. The Roethel and Benjamin catalogue raisonne is the reference for paintings and Roethel for the graphic work. Kandinsky's printed output, particularly Klange and the Bauhaus portfolios, is important and well documented. Watercolours and gouaches are numerous, are the most frequently forged part of the output, and are light-sensitive.
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