Wassily Kandinsky
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50 free Wassily Kandinsky trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Wassily Kandinsky came to painting late and then changed what a painting could be. He walked away from a secure university career, moved to Munich, and within fifteen years was making pictures with no recognisable subject at all. He heard colours as sounds, wrote books to explain what he was doing, and taught a generation of artists and designers at the Bauhaus. This quiz gathers the fun facts behind the famous canvases: his childhood and first career, the friends and rivals of the Blue Rider years, his run-ins with two dictatorships, the theories that linked shapes to colours, and the unexpected things that now carry his name. Every answer comes with a short explanation. It is pitched for curious beginners as much as gallery regulars. If you have seen one Kandinsky poster you will get a few right, and the later questions should stretch people who know their modern art.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Marcel Breuer's steel-tube Model B3, later renamed the Wassily after Kandinsky, is which piece of furniture?
A chair
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.
Q 02A deep crater near the north pole of which world was named after Kandinsky by astronomers in 2012?
Mercury
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.
Q 03Kandinsky painted a 1916 tribute to his future wife Nina's voice after first hearing it through which device?
The telephone
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.
Q 04Which subject was Kandinsky teaching at a Russian university before he quit at 30 to study painting in Munich?
Law
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.
Q 05In his writing on colour and sound, Kandinsky compared bright yellow to the blast of which brass instrument?
Trumpet
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.
Q 06Kandinsky's Bauhaus theory gave yellow to the triangle and red to the square; which shape did he pair with blue?
The circle
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.
Q 07Which composer's opera Lohengrin, heard before Kandinsky left Russia, convinced him music could go beyond mere melody?
Richard Wagner
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.
Q 08Kandinsky's first wife, Anja Chimiakina, whom he married in 1892, was already related to him in which way?
His cousin
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.
Q 09In which Russian city was Kandinsky born, later returning there to marry and to teach after the 1917 revolution?
Moscow
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.
Q 10Kandinsky broke a creative block on Composition VI by chanting the German word for which biblical catastrophe?
The Flood
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.
Q 11Which mining heir began buying Kandinsky's work in 1930 and founded a New York museum that holds over 150 pieces?
Solomon R. Guggenheim
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.
Q 12Which German animal painter, killed at Verdun in 1916, co-founded the Blue Rider with Kandinsky?
Franz Marc
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.
Q 13Which student at Kandinsky's Phalanx art school became his partner and later hid his early canvases from the Nazis?
Q 21To which German city did the Bauhaus move from Weimar in 1925, where Kandinsky lived in a purpose-built masters' home?
Dessau
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.
Q 22In which small Bavarian town near the Alps did Kandinsky paint his way toward abstraction from 1908 onward?
Murnau
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.
Q 23During his last years in exile, Kandinsky sometimes mixed which gritty material into his paint for a rougher texture?
Sand
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.
Gabriele Münter
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.
Q 14Which Swiss-born painter was Kandinsky's Bauhaus colleague and next-door neighbour in a pair of masters' homes?
Paul Klee
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.
Q 15Born a Russian subject, Kandinsky became a German citizen in 1928 and then took which nationality in 1939?
French
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.
Q 16Works by Kandinsky were seized from German museums and mocked in which Nazi exhibition that opened in Munich in 1937?
Degenerate Art
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.
Q 17Besides the piano, which string instrument did the young Kandinsky learn to play as an amateur while growing up?
Cello
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.
Q 18Which Austrian composer's atonal music inspired Kandinsky's 1911 painting Impression III (Concert) and years of letters?
Arnold Schoenberg
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.
Q 19Kandinsky's 1928 stage show set moving abstract shapes to Pictures at an Exhibition by which Russian composer?
Modest Mussorgsky
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.
Q 20Which architect, founder of the Bauhaus, brought Kandinsky from Russia to teach at the school in 1922?
Walter Gropius
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.
Q 24Kandinsky took up a Bavarian folk technique that meant painting his pictures on which material?
Glass
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.
Q 25Kandinsky's 1912 book Klänge, meaning Sounds, set his own woodcuts beside which other kind of work he had written?
Poems
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.
Q 26Kandinsky never saw his stage piece The Yellow Sound performed after which event cancelled its planned Munich premiere?
World War I
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.
Q 27Which Swedish painter's abstract works predate Kandinsky's, challenging his reputation as the first abstract artist?
Hilma af Klint
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.
Q 28Which treatise by Kandinsky pictures humanity's progress as a slowly rising triangle with the artist at its tip?
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
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.
Q 29Which 1926 book by Kandinsky analyses the elements of drawing, calling horizontals cold and verticals hot?
Point and Line to Plane
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.
Q 30Which mystical movement, popularised by Helena Blavatsky, shaped Kandinsky's ideas about the hidden meaning of colour?
Theosophy
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.