Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian-born painter, printmaker and theorist, was one of the pioneers of Abstract art. His paintings of 1913 are considered to be among the first completely abstract compositions in modern art history, as they made no reference to the natural world and were inspired by (and took their titles from) pieces of music. His nonrepresentational paintings paved the way for the development of the Abstract Expressionist movement that dominated American painting after World War II.
He was highly influenced by the sensorial properties of color and sound, and sought to visualize these properties through increasingly abstract compositions. As a painter, Kandinsky tried to translate the most profound human emotions into universally comprehensible symbols and visual sensations. He saw music as the most transcendent form of non-objective art, and strove to produce similarly object-free, spiritually rich paintings.
