Wassily Kandinsky Art Prints

He had been teaching law and economics when, in 1896, he gave it up to train as a painter in Munich. Two memories from Russia stayed with him. On a research trip to the Vologda region in 1889, houses and churches glowed with such colour that stepping inside felt like walking into a painting. And at a Moscow exhibition of Monet, he could not tell that one of the Haystacks showed a haystack, yet the picture fixed itself in his memory.

In Munich he was first the teacher, then the partner, of the painter Gabriele Münter. In 1909 she bought a house in the Bavarian town of Murnau, and in the 1930s she used its basement to hide his work and that of their Blue Rider friends from the Nazis; house searches never found it. His book On the Spiritual in Art argued that colour could stand on its own, apart from describing any object.

That book sorted paintings into three kinds: impressions start from something seen, while improvisations and compositions rise from the unconscious, the composition being the more formally worked out. So Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II), a 1912 oil the Met holds from Alfred Stieglitz's collection, is by his own definition the spontaneous kind, while Composition VIII belongs to the ten Compositions he treated as his ultimate works. He even heard colours: yellow, he said, was middle C on a brassy trumpet.

The First World War sent him back to Moscow in 1914, and from 1922 he taught at the Bauhaus until the Nazis closed it in 1933. There geometry took over his teaching and his canvases, above all the circle, which he called the most peaceful shape and a figure for the human soul. He settled in France, became a French citizen in 1939 and died at Neuilly-sur-Seine on 13 December 1944.