He is credited with painting one of the first recognised purely abstract works. 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—Kandinsky began painting studies life-drawing, sketching and anatomy at the age of He returned to Moscow in , after the outbreak of World War I.
Kandinsky was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Communist Moscow, and returned to Germany in There, he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from until the Nazis closed it in He then moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in and producing some of his most prominent art.
He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in He called this devotion to inner beauty, fervor of spirit, and spiritual desire inner necessity; it was a central aspect of his art. Kandinsky learned from a variety of sources while in Moscow. He studied many fields while in school, including law and economics. Later in life, he would recall being fascinated and stimulated by colour as a child. His fascination with colour symbolism and psychology continued as he grew. In , he was part of an ethnographic research group which travelled to the Vologda region north of Moscow.
In Looks on the Past, he relates that the houses and churches were decorated with such shimmering colours that upon entering them, he felt that he was moving into a painting.
In , at the age of 30, Kandinsky gave up a promising career teaching law and economics to enroll in the Munich Academy where his teachers would eventually include Franz von Stuck. He was not immediately granted admission, and began learning art on his own. That same year, before leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of paintings by Monet. He was particularly taken with the impressionistic style of Haystacks; this, to him, had a powerful sense of colour almost independent of the objects themselves.
