Wassily Kandinsky

Birth name	Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky
Born	16 December [O.S. 4 December] 1866 Moscow
Died	13 December 1944(1944-12-13) (aged 78) Neuilly-sur-Seine
Nationality	Russian
Field	Painting
Training	Academy of Fine Arts, Munich
Movement	Expressionism; abstract art
Works	On White II, Der Blaue Reiter

Early-period work, Munich-Schwabing with the Church of St. Ursula (1908)

Composition VII—according to Kandinsky, the most complex piece he ever painted (1913)

On White II (1923)

Composition X (1939)

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky: 16 December [O.S. 4 December] 1866 – 13 December 1944) was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat—he began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.
In 1896 Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbe's private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts. He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Kandinsky was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow, and returned to Germany in 1921. There, he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.

 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily_Kandinsky