Vassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky lived in Moscow from 1914 to 1921. In 1918 he was invited by both Soviet cultural bureaucrats and his colleagues to teach at the Svomas (Free State Art Schools), the radically oriented institutions that had replaced the traditional art schools swept away by the October Revolution. Two years later he was asked to head Inkhuk (The Institute of Artistic Culture) in Moscow.

At the age of fifty he married Nina Andreewsky, the beautiful young daughter of a Russian general. But his stay in Moscow was short-lived and he and his new wife, Nina, left Russia and resettled in Germany. There he spent eleven years as a master at the Bauhaus. The Kandinskys shared one of the double houses Gropius designed for the Bauhaus masters with his good friend the Swiss artist Paul Klee and his family. Kandinsky and Nina lived harmoniously together until he died.

In 1929 the Baroness Hilla Rebay, a 39-year old artist turned art adviser, brought the American millionaire Solomon R. Guggenheim to visit Kandinsky's studio in Dessau. As a result, when the Museum of Non-Objective Art opened ten years later, Kandinsky's work was its esthetic and spiritual heart. That museum was the forerunner of the Guggenheim Museum of today.

Kandinsky left Germany in 1933 and settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine outside Paris. He had already seen his work banned and vilified in the Nazi Party's notorious exhibitions of "Degenerate Art".

He died in Neuilly, France on December 13, 1944.