The Green Women

The creator of the first modern abstract paintings, Wassily Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. In his youth, he studied law and economics at the University of Moscow, and was later hired as a professor of Roman law at the University of Dorpat in Estonia. He was 30 years old when he began his studies in painting, focusing on life drawing, sketching, and anatomy, at the University of Munich. He was not immediately accepted into the school as an art student and so in the meantime he began learning art by himself, gaining artistic insight from Monet’s Haystacks and Richard Wagner’s composition Lohengrin. He was also influenced by the teachings of anthroposophy, as such, his abstract works were a creation of his intense philosophical beliefs, based on his own personal experiences with art. The devotion to inner beauty remained a central theme in his art.