Wassily Kandinsky is widely credited as the pioneer of abstract art. A lawyer who took up painting at 30 after hearing a Wagner opera and seeing a Monet haystack, he developed the conviction that art, like music, could express pure emotion through color and form without reference to the visible world. His 1911 essay 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art' is the foundational theoretical text of abstraction. He taught at the Bauhaus alongside Paul Klee and was expelled by the Nazis in 1933, moving to Paris where he spent his final years.
