Abstract watercolor paintings have become a mainstream genre of art and a lot of the credit for this has to go to the Russian artist, Wassily Kandisky who accidentally discovered abstract art one day in his studio when he realised that shapes and colours were descriptive on their own and there was no need for definition.
Kandisky was born in Moscow in 1866 but spent most of his childhood in Odessa. Music played an important part in his early life (both his parents played instruments and he also learnt how to play the piano and cello) and this would become an inspiration for some of his later watercolor work, as is apparent from the names of the paintings such as Improvisations, Impressions and Compositions.
In 1886, he enrolled at the University of Moscow where he studied law and economics and he went onto become a successful lecturer at the Moscow Faculty of Law.
In fact he did not start painting until the age of 30 after he had attended an exhibition of French impressionists and was particularly disappointed by Monet’s ‘Haystacks at Giverny’ which he was unable to recognise as a haystack and thought that “the painter had no right to paint in such an imprecise fashion”. He therefore left Moscow in 1896 and went to study art in Munich, first in the private school of Anton Azbe and then later at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.
It was not long before Kandisky’s talent surpassed the constraints of art school and he soon began to explore his own ideas of painting. Now with the title of ‘founder of abstract art’, his work was exhibited throughout Europe in the early twentieth century but not without controversy among the public, his contemporaries and art critics.
Kandisky was an active participant in several of the most influential and controversial art movements of the 20th century, including the Blue Rider which he founded along with Franz Marc and the Bauhaus. His reputation also became firmly established in the United States and as soon as his work was introduced to Solomon Guggenheim, he became one of Kandisky’s most enthusiastic supporters.
In 1933, Kandisky left Germany and moved to France where he became a French citizen in 1939 and lived the rest of his life until his death in 1944.