Painter Wassily Kandinsky was born on December 4, 1866, in Moscow, Russia. His birth date is December 16 in the Gregorian calendar. He died on December 13, 1944.
Born into a middle-class family in Moscow, he moved to the Black Sea port city of Odessa at the age of five, where his parents divorced shortly thereafter. Around this time, he began painting as a hobby, but he also studied law at Moscow State University and worked as an assistant professor at the university's law faculty after graduating.
A turning point for Kandinsky came when he attended a French art exhibition in Moscow. He was so impressed by Monet's "Haystacks" that he moved to Munich in 1896. He enrolled at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and became immersed in his artistic endeavors under the tutelage of Franz von Stuck, a leading Symbolist painter. Meanwhile, Kandinsky founded the artist collective "Pharlanx" with his colleagues in 1901, and held numerous exhibitions over the next few years. He also established an art school and began teaching student Gabriele Münter, with whom he soon fell in love. Kandinsky was married at the time, but after divorcing in 1904, he traveled around Europe with Münter on creative tours. In 1909, he formed the Munich Association of New Artists. Around this time, Kandinsky moved to Murnau, a village at the foot of the Alps. In 1911, he resigned as president of the association and, together with his colleagues, launched the annual magazine "The Blue Rider." The magazine's content aimed to "break away from figuration," and it was here that Kandinsky produced the series of "Compositions," which would become his signature works. These paintings depict not the physical form of objects but rather phenomena and the inner thoughts of those who view them, revealing Kandinsky's intention to break away from abstraction. His style would later be called abstractionism, and Kandinsky, as a pioneer of this style, had a profound influence on the world of painting.

However, shortly after, World War I broke out, and The Blue Rider naturally disintegrated, and Kandinsky returned to Russia. He became a member of the Moscow Department of Plastic Arts (IZO) under Lenin's administration, serving as head of the Department of Theater and Film, and director of the Museum of Painting Culture. In 1921, he emigrated to Germany and became an instructor at the Bauhaus, a comprehensive school of art and architecture.

When the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis in 1933, Kandinsky emigrated to Paris and acquired French citizenship. When France was occupied by Germany during World War II, he was banned from exhibiting, but he remained undeterred and continued to produce abstract paintings throughout his life.