Wassily Kandinsky, 1866-1944: The Journey to Abstraction

"A man who can move mountains." Thus Franz Marc described his friend and colleague Wassily Kandinsky, who revolutionized the art of our century with his ideas of a new pictorial language.For as founder of abstract painting Kandinsky released art from its traditional duty—namely, to provide a copy of the visible world. Although, in the early years of the twentieth century, there were other artists similarly experimenting with the dissolution of the object and the promotion of color and form to means of expression in their own right, Kandinsky was the most logical and consistent in his pursuit of abstract means of expression. He made it his life's work to carry painting up to and over the threshold of abstraction, whereby his artistic activities were always accompanied by theoretical reflections and insights.