WASSILY KANDINSKY|8 MIN READ
Kandinsky and the Bauhaus
Follow Wassily Kandinsky from post-revolutionary Moscow to the classrooms of Weimar and Dessau, where teaching reshaped his abstract art.
WRITER Moryarty
Wassily Kandinsky joined the Bauhaus in Weimar in June 1922 and remained with the German school until its closure in 1933. During those eleven years, he taught color, form and analytical drawing while producing some of his most ordered abstract paintings.
His shift toward circles, grids and straight lines was tied to the school's workshops and its growing interest in design for industrial production. The story runs through three cities, two directors, rising political pressure and a close working friendship with Paul Klee.
Why he accepted Gropius's invitation
Kandinsky arrived in Weimar after spending the years surrounding the Russian Revolution in Moscow. He had helped establish new cultural institutions under the revolutionary government, including the Institute of Artistic Culture, known as INKhUK, and the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences. His spiritual approach to abstraction soon conflicted with younger Constructivists who wanted art to serve production, engineering and the new state.
By December 1921, Kandinsky had returned to Germany with his wife, Nina. The move brought him back to a country where he already had a substantial reputation. Before the First World War, he had co-founded Der Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc in Munich and published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, his argument that color and form could carry meaning without representing visible objects.
Walter Gropius offered him a teaching position in 1922. The appointment made sense for both men. Gropius needed an established international artist, while Kandinsky wanted a setting where he could develop his ideas through structured teaching rather than political administration.
He was 55 when he joined, considerably older than many students and several colleagues. He took charge of the wall-painting workshop and taught compulsory courses in elementary design. His arrival also reunited him with Paul Klee, who had been teaching at Weimar since 1921.
Kandinsky and Klee had known each other in Munich before the war, but their friendship became closer at the school. When it moved to Dessau, the two families occupied adjoining halves of one of Gropius's Masters' Houses from 1926. Their work remained distinct. Klee often built images from small signs and irregular growth patterns, while Kandinsky increasingly tested sharp geometric relationships.
Inside his classroom
Students entering Kandinsky's courses didn't begin by making free compositions. They analysed existing objects and images, reducing them to directional forces, tensions, weight and balance. Surviving student exercises show ordinary scenes converted into networks of lines before being reorganised as abstract diagrams.
His analytical drawing course usually progressed through several stages. A student first identified the main structural lines in an image. The next drawing reduced secondary details, and the final version retained only the strongest forces. Kandinsky wanted students to explain why a diagonal appeared active or why a cluster seemed heavier than an open area.
Color was taught through planned contrasts rather than personal preference. Students compared warm and cool hues, light and dark values, and the optical effects produced when adjacent colors changed one another. Kandinsky associated yellow with outward movement and blue with inward movement, ideas he had already described in his 1912 book.
He also proposed relationships between primary colors and basic shapes. Yellow corresponded to the triangle, red to the square and blue to the circle. A famous questionnaire circulated at the school asked staff and students to assign the three colors to those shapes, but the answers were not unanimous. The surviving responses weaken the popular claim that the school discovered a universal shape-color code.
The wall-painting workshop gave those lessons a physical use. Color on architecture had to respond to doors, corners, sightlines and room dimensions. Kandinsky's students therefore worked beyond the portable canvas, even as the workshop gradually moved closer to interior decoration under Hinnerk Scheper.
In 1926, Kandinsky published Point and Line to Plane as the ninth volume in the Bauhaus Books series. He defined the point as the smallest graphic element and examined how straight, curved and angled lines behaved within a plane. The diagrams turned his classroom material into a system that readers outside the school could test for themselves.
Geometry takes over
The change in his painting had begun before his appointment, but Weimar accelerated it. Russian Suprematism and Constructivism had exposed him to floating circles, intersecting planes and engineered structures. At the school, those elements entered daily conversations about architecture, typography and industrial design.
His pre-war paintings had often used irregular color fields and sweeping marks. Works made after 1922 gave geometric forms firmer edges and clearer positions. Circles, triangles and checkerboard grids started sharing the canvas with looser curves and biomorphic shapes.
Kandinsky never became a strict Constructivist. Artists such as El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko often treated geometry as part of a practical visual language for publications, exhibitions and political communication. Kandinsky retained a belief that form and color could produce inner, psychological effects.
That difference explains why his geometry rarely looks mechanically uniform. Circles overlap or drift away from implied grids. Thin diagonals pass through dense clusters without locking them into a fixed structure. Even his straight lines vary in length, direction and visual pressure.
The school's move to Dessau in 1925 strengthened its technical direction. Gropius's new building used reinforced concrete, glass curtain walls and separate wings arranged according to function. Herbert Bayer developed sans-serif typography and asymmetric page layouts for its publications. Kandinsky worked amid people applying geometric order to buildings, furniture, textiles and printed matter.
Paintings made at Weimar and Dessau
Composition VIII, painted in Weimar in 1923, marks a decisive stage in his geometric work. Its circles, arcs and intersecting lines occupy a pale field without conventional depth. A large black circle anchors the upper left, while smaller elements spread across the two-metre-wide canvas.
The painting still refuses perfect mathematical order. Several forms overlap without matching, and the visual weight is distributed unevenly. Kandinsky used calculation as a starting point, then disrupted it to prevent the picture becoming a static diagram.
Yellow-Red-Blue followed in 1925, the year the school left Weimar. Measuring approximately 127 by 200 centimetres, it divides its wide format between a pale yellow zone and a darker blue area. A red grid, black diagonals and a deep blue circle connect the two halves.
In 1926, he painted Several Circles, a square composition held by a dark ground. Dozens of circles differ in size, transparency and color. Some overlap to create new hues, showing how his classroom experiments with adjacent and superimposed colors entered his studio practice.
Upward, completed in 1929, uses a smaller vertical format and a figure-like arrangement of geometric parts. Two circles suggest eyes, while a pointed lower section resembles a chin or pedestal. The painting sits between pure abstraction and the human tendency to find faces in simple shapes.
His work also circulated through print. The 1922 portfolio Kleine Welten, or Small Worlds, contained twelve prints made with lithography, woodcut and drypoint. Using three processes let him compare flat color, carved edges and incised lines within one coordinated edition.
A visual grammar outlives the school
Political pressure followed the school through each move. Conservative authorities in Thuringia cut its funding, forcing the transfer from Weimar to Dessau. The Dessau municipal government closed it in 1932 after the Nazi Party gained local power, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe reopened it privately in a former factory in Berlin.
The Gestapo searched the Berlin premises on 11 April 1933. Faculty members voted to dissolve the school that August rather than accept conditions imposed by the Nazi authorities. Kandinsky left Germany for Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, where he lived until his death in 1944.
His teaching survived through publications, former students and the international movement of former staff. Josef Albers carried a related system of disciplined visual exercises to Black Mountain College and later Yale. László Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937, bringing workshop-based design education into an American setting.
Later graphic designers adopted many devices that Kandinsky had analysed, including directional lines, asymmetrical balance and the controlled contrast of geometric forms. Those devices didn't originate with one teacher, but his books gave them names, diagrams and repeatable classroom exercises.
His influence on abstract art was equally direct. He demonstrated that geometric painting didn't have to imitate engineering or eliminate subjective judgment. Artists could use circles and grids as expressive material, adjusting scale, color and position as carefully as a composer adjusts rhythm.
Living with geometric abstraction
Works from the 1920s suit rooms that already contain straight architectural lines. A print with open ground can sit above a low cabinet without making the wall feel crowded, while a denser composition needs more empty space around its frame.
Within our Wassily Kandinsky collection, the main choice is between busy linear compositions like Kleine Welten IV and quieter works organised around a few large forms, such as Bleu de Ciel. In our experience, buyers who initially choose the most colorful image often prefer a simpler print once they compare both designs at wall distance.
A black aluminium frame reinforces black diagonals and circular outlines. Light interiors can take a pine wood frame, which softens the hard geometry. Magnetic frames leave the print exposed, so they're a poor choice near kitchens, direct sunlight or frequently opened windows.
Did you know?
- Kandinsky trained in law and economics at Moscow University before leaving for Munich to study art in 1896.
- He declined a professorship at the University of Dorpat, now the University of Tartu, before changing careers.
- He became a German citizen in 1928 and a French citizen in 1939.
- The 1922 Small Worlds portfolio combined lithography, woodcut and drypoint in a single set of twelve prints.
- Galka Scheyer promoted Kandinsky, Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Alexej von Jawlensky in the United States as the Blue Four.
- Nazi authorities removed dozens of his works from German public collections during the campaign against so-called degenerate art.
Quick answers we hear all the time
Where can I see his paintings in person? The Lenbachhaus in Munich holds a major group of works connected with Kandinsky and Der Blaue Reiter. The Guggenheim Museum in New York owns more than 150 works by him, including paintings, watercolors and prints.
Can I visit the buildings where he taught? Yes. The 1926 school building and the Masters' Houses in Dessau are open to visitors through the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. Kandinsky shared one of the double houses with Paul Klee.
How can I identify an original Kandinsky print? Check the printing process, paper, edition information and catalogue raisonné record. A signature alone isn't proof, since authorized editions, later impressions and reproductions can all carry printed or facsimile signatures.
Are original prints affordable? Prices vary sharply according to process, condition, edition and provenance. A modern fine art reproduction is the sensible choice if you want the image rather than the risks, conservation costs and documentation attached to an original.
Why is his first name spelled Vasily, Wassily or Vassily? The variations come from different systems for transliterating the Russian name Василий into the Latin alphabet. Museums retain different spellings, but they refer to the same artist.
About the author
Moryarty has curated vintage poster reproductions since 2015, with a team based in Barcelona and Lisbon and reseller partners across Europe. We've spent more than a decade comparing how modernist compositions reproduce on fine art paper, especially works whose pale grounds and narrow lines can disappear in poor printing.