Wassily Kandinsky was born on 4 December 1866, which is fifteen years before Picasso, and we should perhaps note for whatever significance it may have that his father's family came from Siberia, and that his father was actually born at Kjachta near the Chinese frontier. One of his great-grandmothers was an Asiatic princess. His mother's family, however, came from Moscow, where Kandinsky himself was born.

Kandinsky's first intention was to be a musician--another significant fact, to be repeated in Klee's life. But at the age of twenty he went to Moscow University to study law and economics, and during this period made his first contact with the ancient art of Russia. He used to insist that the profound impression made on him by the medieval icons of Russia influenced the whole of his artistic development. Another early influence was the folk-art of Russia, with which he became familiar in the course of an ethnographic survey which he made in the northern provinces in 1889. In this same year he studied the old masters in Moscow and St Petersburg and made a first visit to Paris. He returned to the French capital again in 1892. In 1893 he took his degree in law at Moscow University.

In 1895, in his twenty-ninth year, he saw for the first time an exhibition of the French Impressionists, and that experience was decisive. He abandoned his legal career and the next year went to Munich to study painting. Three years later, in 1900, he received his diploma from the Royal Academy in Munich.

Some of his subsequent activities have already been recorded in connection with the origins of Expressionism. One should note as significant that he spent the autumn of 1902 in Paris, the winter of 1902-3 in Tunisia, and then settled in Rapallo (Italy) for more than a year. He next moved to Dresden, but was again in Paris early the following year (1906), and there (or rather at Sevres near Paris) he remained for a year. In 1907 he went to Berlin for some months and finally in 1908 returned to Munich where he was to settle for the next six decisive years.

Kandinsky had packed a lot of experience into these twelve years of wandering apprenticeship, and by the time he reached Munich in 1908 his painting had already gone through several stylistic phases, from the academicism he learned at the Academy under Franz Stuck, through successive degrees of eclecticism (folk-art, impressionism, post-impressionism) until now, at the age of thirty-four, he felt that the time had come to consolidate his experiences and to formulate his intuitions of the possibilities of the art of painting, possibilities which had entered his mind and vision that day, twelve years earlier, when he had first seen a painting by Monet.

What else had he seen in those twelve years? Cezanne, of course, and the Fauves--whatever there was to see in the Paris of 1902-6. In that period he became a Fauve himself, but once back in Munich he began to follow his own instincts and the result was a complete emancipation from the influences that had hitherto dominated him. In his book, which we will presently consider in more detail, he refers to Matisse as 'the greatest of the young Frenchmen', and to Picasso as 'another great young artist in Paris', in whose work 'there is never any suspicion of conventional beauty'. ' Matisse--color. Picasso--form. Two great signposts pointing towards a great end.'

When the war broke out in August 1914, Kandinsky fled from Munich and made his way back to Moscow via Switzerland. He left behind him a collection of experimental work which by chance was preserved intact, and it is now in the Stedtische Galerie of Munich. This material shows that Kandinsky for about two years after his return to Munich was still anchored to the motif, usually a landscape, and that his extremist variations were still organic in feeling. Then, according to Lorenz Eitner who has published an interesting study of this material, there occurred a sudden break-through to non-objective painting, that is to say, to an art emancipated from the motif. 'The increasing abstraction in Kandinsky's landscapes and figure compositions does not lead to it directly, nor is it the gradual emancipation of color from descriptive meaning that brings it about. Totally non-objective shapes are found first in studies of primarily graphic character rather than in color compositions. The Munter Collection includes several such drawings in pen and ink or in pencil. Their criss-crossing lines, some spidery and sharp, some softly blurred, shoot across the paper singly or in tangles, like the traces of sudden energy discharges, suggestive only of motion or tension, not of body.' This may sound like mere doodling, but the evidence shows that all these seemingly fortuitous strokes or blotches were painstakingly formulated, repeated, and perfected. It was a calculated informality. . .

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