50 Fun Facts About Wassily Kandinsky

Marcel Breuer's steel-tube Model B3, later renamed the Wassily after Kandinsky, is which piece of furniture?

A chair, and Kandinsky never commissioned it: he simply admired the finished design at the Bauhaus, so Breuer made him a copy. An Italian maker gave it his first name decades later.

A deep crater near the north pole of which world was named after Kandinsky by astronomers in 2012?

Mercury has the Kandinsky crater, whose floor lies in permanent shadow. Radar and spacecraft images suggest that the shadow hides a deposit of water ice.

Kandinsky painted a 1916 tribute to his future wife Nina's voice after first hearing it through which device?

The telephone carried Nina Andreevskaya's voice to him before the two had met, and he answered with a picture titled as a tribute to an unknown voice. They married six months after meeting.

Which subject was Kandinsky teaching at a Russian university before he quit at 30 to study painting in Munich?

Law was his field: he lectured on it after graduating and was offered a professorship in 1896. He turned the post down and took a train to Germany to become a painter.

In his writing on colour and sound, Kandinsky compared bright yellow to the blast of which brass instrument?

Trumpet was his match for yellow, a colour he found aggressive and earthly. Blue sat at the other extreme, and he likened it to the heavenly sound of a pipe organ.

Kandinsky's Bauhaus theory gave yellow to the triangle and red to the square; which shape did he pair with blue?

The circle took blue in the scheme, which he tested in 1923 by asking Bauhaus students to colour in the three shapes. A 2013 reaction-time study found no evidence that people share the pairing.

Which composer's opera Lohengrin, heard before Kandinsky left Russia, convinced him music could go beyond mere melody?

Richard Wagner's Lohengrin was one of two shocks that pushed him toward painting; the other was a picture of a haystack he could not recognise. He gave up his university career soon after.

Kandinsky's first wife, Anja Chimiakina, whom he married in 1892, was already related to him in which way?

His cousin Anja married him while he was still an academic, years before he took up painting. The marriage was later dissolved after a long separation.

In which Russian city was Kandinsky born, later returning there to marry and to teach after the 1917 revolution?

Moscow was his birthplace, and he went back when war broke out in 1914. Under the new Soviet government he became a professor and helped organise 22 museums before leaving for Germany again.

Kandinsky broke a creative block on Composition VI by chanting the German word for which biblical catastrophe?

The Flood was the picture's theme, and his partner told him to repeat 'Überflut' for its sound, not its meaning. He finished the huge canvas within days.

Which mining heir began buying Kandinsky's work in 1930 and founded a New York museum that holds over 150 pieces?

Solomon R. Guggenheim started buying after visiting the painter's studio with his adviser Hilla Rebay. His collection first opened in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting.

Which German animal painter, killed at Verdun in 1916, co-founded the Blue Rider with Kandinsky?

Franz Marc edited the group's book with Kandinsky as its only other editor. He was killed by a shell splinter before an order withdrawing him from combat could arrive.

Which student at Kandinsky's Phalanx art school became his partner and later hid his early canvases from the Nazis?

Gabriele Münter kept his pre-1914 pictures in her Bavarian cellar right through the Nazi years. On her 80th birthday she gave the whole hoard to the city of Munich.

Which Swiss-born painter was Kandinsky's Bauhaus colleague and next-door neighbour in a pair of masters' homes?

Paul Klee lived in the other half of the semi-detached home, and the two had been friends since their Blue Rider days. Both had also studied under the same Munich professor.

Born a Russian subject, Kandinsky became a German citizen in 1928 and then took which nationality in 1939?

French citizenship came six years after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus and he left Germany for good. He spent the last 11 years of his life in the same suburban apartment.

Works by Kandinsky were seized from German museums and mocked in which Nazi exhibition that opened in Munich in 1937?

Degenerate Art put confiscated modern pictures on show to turn the public against them. One Kandinsky displayed there, a 1916 canvas named for two kinds of red, has been lost ever since.

Besides the piano, which string instrument did the young Kandinsky learn to play as an amateur while growing up?

Cello and piano were his instruments as a schoolboy, and music shaped his art for life. He gave paintings musical titles and compared colours to the sounds of an orchestra.

Which Austrian composer's atonal music inspired Kandinsky's 1911 painting Impression III (Concert) and years of letters?

Arnold Schoenberg broke the rules of harmony just as Kandinsky was abandoning recognisable subjects, and the two began to correspond. The composer also painted, and showed with the Blue Rider.

Kandinsky's 1928 stage show set moving abstract shapes to Pictures at an Exhibition by which Russian composer?

Modest Mussorgsky wrote the suite as a musical tour of a late friend's memorial show. Kandinsky's stage designs for it were brought to life again on video in 2015, following his own notes.

Which architect, founder of the Bauhaus, brought Kandinsky from Russia to teach at the school in 1922?

Walter Gropius appointed him in June 1922, and Kandinsky stayed until the school's final day in 1933. For the last ten of those years he was its deputy director.

To which German city did the Bauhaus move from Weimar in 1925, where Kandinsky lived in a purpose-built masters' home?

Dessau offered the school a new home after right-wing hostility drove it out of Weimar. A Nazi smear campaign forced one more move, to Berlin, in 1932.

In which small Bavarian town near the Alps did Kandinsky paint his way toward abstraction from 1908 onward?

Murnau gave him the alpine landscapes he simplified into flat, bold colour, as in The Blue Mountain. The home he shared there is now one of the town's main attractions.

During his last years in exile, Kandinsky sometimes mixed which gritty material into his paint for a rougher texture?

Sand gave his late pictures a granular, rustic surface. He painted them in his living room, filling the canvases with soft shapes that resemble creatures seen under a microscope.

Kandinsky took up a Bavarian folk technique that meant painting his pictures on which material?

Glass pictures were a Bavarian village craft that he and his partner took up. The painter works backwards, laying down the dark outlines first, and the result is viewed through the pane.

Kandinsky's 1912 book Klänge, meaning Sounds, set his own woodcuts beside which other kind of work he had written?

Poems, 38 of them in prose, filled the book, in which he repeated words until only their pure sound was left. It went on to influence Dada and Russian Futurism.

Kandinsky never saw his stage piece The Yellow Sound performed after which event cancelled its planned Munich premiere?

World War I broke out while he and his Blue Rider colleagues were preparing the production. The piece finally had its premiere in New York in 1972, long after his death.

Which Swedish painter's abstract works predate Kandinsky's, challenging his reputation as the first abstract artist?

Hilma af Klint painted her first abstract series in 1906, then directed that the work stay unseen until twenty years after her death. Kandinsky's own breakthrough came around 1910 to 1913.

Which treatise by Kandinsky pictures humanity's progress as a slowly rising triangle with the artist at its tip?

Concerning the Spiritual in Art argued that painting could move the soul as directly as music does. An English translation in 1914 carried his ideas through the English-speaking world.

Which 1926 book by Kandinsky analyses the elements of drawing, calling horizontals cold and verticals hot?

Point and Line to Plane grew out of his Bauhaus classes on form. Where his first treatise dealt mainly with colour, this one dissects dots, strokes and surfaces.

Which mystical movement, popularised by Helena Blavatsky, shaped Kandinsky's ideas about the hidden meaning of colour?

Theosophy held that thoughts and feelings take visible colours and forms. Kandinsky bought its illustrated book on the subject in 1908 and joined its society the following year.

Kandinsky's Blue Rider group published its mix of modern, folk and children's art in 1912 as which kind of book?

An almanac was the plan from the start, and Kandinsky first thought of calling it The Chain. It printed folk art and children's paintings beside new work by the group.

Which Russian institution, home to the Theotokos of Vladimir icon, also holds Kandinsky's monumental Composition VII?

The Tretyakov owns the canvas, in which historians read hints of Judgment Day, the Resurrection and the Garden of Eden. Its sister picture, Composition VI, hangs in the Hermitage.

In which southern seaport did Kandinsky grow up and finish school after his parents settled there in 1871?

Odessa was home from the age of four, and there he became an amateur musician and painter. He left for university in 1886.

Kandinsky's father, Vassily Silvestrovich, supported the well-travelled family as a merchant dealing in which commodity?

Tea was his father's business, and he came from Kyakhta, a Siberian town near the Chinese border. The family's comfort let the boy see Venice, Rome and Florence while still a child.

Kandinsky's last picture made in Germany is thought to allude to Nazi storm troopers through which colour in its title?

Brown gives Development in Brown its name: a sober canvas from 1933, the year the Nazis shut the Bauhaus. Hitler's storm troopers were known as the brownshirts.

What nickname, still in use, did neighbours give the Bavarian country home Kandinsky shared with his partner from 1909?

The Russian House, or Russenhaus, was named for Kandinsky, who moved in with his German partner in 1909. Blue Rider pictures were later hidden in its basement.

Which Bauhaus craft workshop did Kandinsky direct at Weimar from 1922 to 1925 alongside his theory classes?

Wall painting was his workshop, although he had been hired as a famous easel painter. Only after the school moved in 1925 was he allowed a class in free painting.

On her 80th birthday in 1957, Kandinsky's former partner gave a trove of Blue Rider works to which Munich museum?

Lenbachhaus became home to the world's largest Blue Rider collection thanks to the gift. Many of the pictures had spent the Nazi years hidden in a Bavarian basement.

Which New York photographer paid $500 for the Kandinsky shown at the 1913 Armory Show, now in the Metropolitan Museum?

Alfred Stieglitz bought the canvas, subtitled Garden of Love II, while the show was still running. It entered the Met in 1949 as part of his collection.

In 1896 Kandinsky turned down a professorship at the University of Dorpat, a city now called Tartu in which country?

Estonia was then under Russian rule, and the post would have secured his academic career. In what he called a now-or-never mood, he took a train to Germany to become a painter instead.

Kandinsky's 1889 trip to the Vologda region, where painted peasant houses dazzled him, was research in which field?

Ethnography sent him north on a university mission to study peasant life. He came home with a lasting interest in the bright, unrealistic styles of Russian folk art.

Which phrase did Kandinsky use for the artist's driving impulse, the principle he said must guide every form and colour?

Inner necessity meant devotion to an inward beauty and fervour, not to copying the visible world. For Kandinsky a picture was good only if it sprang from that need.

In his final years, which word did Kandinsky prefer to 'abstract' as the proper name for his kind of painting?

Concrete was the label he came to prefer in his last decade. His nephew, a philosopher, used it in the title of a 1936 essay on the pictures.

Which Munich Academy professor, famous for the Symbolist painting The Sin, taught Kandinsky until his 1900 diploma?

Franz von Stuck took him into his class after two years at a private school and a year of working alone. Josef Albers, later a Bauhaus colleague, was another of the professor's pupils.

Kandinsky's restless travels of 1903 to 1908 took him as far south as Kairouan in which North African country?

Tunisia was the southern limit of five wandering years that also took in Holland, Italy and Dresden. He stayed several months in each place before settling in Bavaria.

In which country did dealer Galka Scheyer promote the Blue Four, a group uniting Kandinsky with three fellow painters?

United States galleries were her target from 1924, and she opened the group's first show there in New York a year later. Lyonel Feininger and Alexej von Jawlensky were two of the other three.

Which Dutch master's paintings in the Hermitage did the young Kandinsky discover in 1889 while still a student?

Rembrandt's pictures in St Petersburg were part of a visual education he gave himself alongside his university studies. He also travelled to Paris that year to look at art.

Kandinsky's widow Nina left her remaining collection of his paintings and papers to which modern art institution?

Centre Pompidou received the bequest after her death in 1980. She had already set up a Kandinsky society there the year before.

Which Russian-born philosopher, famed for his 1930s lectures on Hegel, was Kandinsky's nephew?

Alexandre Kojève wrote an influential essay on his uncle's pictures in 1936, in the middle of his Hegel seminars. He later worked as an international civil servant.

Which composer wrote the original score, since lost, for Kandinsky's experimental stage piece The Yellow Sound?

Thomas de Hartmann's music vanished, so later stagings needed new scores. The 1972 premiere used a reconstruction by Gunther Schuller, and a Russian production used one by Alfred Schnittke.