A few years later, he first likened painting to composing music in the manner for which he would become noted, writing "Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmony, the soul is the piano with many strings.

In 1896, 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.

[11] Kandinsky was similarly influenced during this period by Richard Wagner's Lohengrin which, he felt, pushed the limits of music and melody beyond standard lyricism.

Perhaps the most important of his paintings from the first decade of the 1900s was The Blue Rider (1903), which shows a small cloaked figure on a speeding horse rushing through a rocky meadow.

This intentional disjunction, allowing viewers to participate in the creation of the artwork, became an increasingly conscious technique used by Kandinsky in subsequent years; it culminated in the abstract works of the 1911–1914 period.

From 1906 to 1908, Kandinsky spent a great deal of time travelling across Europe (he was an associate of the Blue Rose symbolist group of Moscow) until he settled in the small Bavarian town of Murnau.

Kandinsky then formed a new group, The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) with like-minded artists such as August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch, and Gabriele Münter.

Extracts from the book were published that year in Percy Wyndham Lewis's periodical Blast, and Alfred Orage's weekly cultural newspaper The New Age.

Kandinsky had received some notice earlier in Britain, however; in 1910, he participated in the Allied Artists' Exhibition (organised by Frank Rutter) at London's Royal Albert Hall.

It is only the final chord of a symphony that takes every colour to the zenith of life that, like the fortissimo of a great orchestra, is both compelled and allowed by Moscow to ring out.From 1918 to 1921, Kandinsky was involved in the cultural politics of Russia and collaborated in art education and museum reform.

This freedom is characterised in his works by the treatment of planes rich in colours and gradations—as in Yellow – red – blue (1925), where Kandinsky illustrates his distance from the constructivism and suprematism movements influential at the time.

The two-metre-wide (6 ft 7 in) Yellow – red – blue (1925) of several main forms: a vertical yellow rectangle, an inclined red cross and a large dark blue circle; a multitude of straight (or sinuous) black lines, circular arcs, monochromatic circles and scattered, coloured checker-boards contribute to its delicate complexity.

Kandinsky was one of Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four), which was a group that was formed in 1923 with Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Alexej von Jawlensky at the instigation of Galka Scheyer, who promoted their work in the United States from 1924 onward.

[citation needed] Fascinated by Christian eschatology and the perception of a coming New Age,[27] a common theme among Kandinsky's first seven Compositions is the apocalypse (the end of the world as we know it).

Writing of the "artist as prophet" in his book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky created paintings in the years immediately preceding World War I showing a coming cataclysm which would alter individual and social reality.

Having a devout belief in Orthodox Christianity,[28] Kandinsky drew upon the biblical stories of Noah's Ark, Jonah and the whale, Christ's resurrection, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse in the book of Revelation, Russian folktales and the common mythological experiences of death and rebirth.

Never attempting to picture any one of these stories as a narrative, he used their veiled imagery as symbols of the archetypes of death–rebirth and destruction–creation he felt were imminent in the pre-World War I world.

Kandinsky was aware of recent scientific developments and the advances of modern artists who had contributed to radically new ways of seeing and experiencing the world.

As in his painting of the apocalypse by water (Composition VI), Kandinsky puts the viewer in the situation of experiencing these epic myths by translating them into contemporary terms (with a sense of desperation, flurry, urgency, and confusion).

As the Der Blaue Reiter Almanac essays and theorising with composer Arnold Schoenberg indicate, Kandinsky also expressed the communion between artist and viewer as being available to both the senses and the mind (synesthesia).

[29][30] Kandinsky also developed a theory of geometric figures and their relationships, claiming (for example) that the circle is the most peaceful shape and represents the human soul.

Kandinsky's legendary stage design for a performance of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition illustrates his synesthetic concept of a universal correspondence of forms, colors and musical sounds.

In 2015, the original designs of the stage elements were animated with modern video technology and synchronized with the music according to the preparatory notes of Kandinsky and the director's script of Felix Klee.

[36] Driven by the Christian faith and the inner necessity[37] of an artist, his paintings have the ambiguity of the form rendered in a variety of colours as well as resistance against conventional aesthetic values of the art world.

[citation needed] As Kandinsky started moving away from his early inspiration from Impressionism, his paintings became more vibrant, pictographic and expressive with more sharp shapes and clear linear qualities.

But eventually, Kandinsky went further, rejecting pictorial representation with more synesthetic swirling hurricanes of colours and shapes, eliminating traditional references to depth and laying out bare and abstracted glyphs; however, what remained consistent was his spiritual pursuit of expressive forms.

[38] With diverse dimensions and bright hues balanced through a careful juxtaposition of proportion and colours, he substantiated the universality of shapes in his artworks thus paving the way for further abstraction.

[41] Published in Munich in 1911, Kandinsky's text Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the spiritual in art) defines three types of painting: impressions, improvisations and compositions.

[54][55] In 2017, Robert Colin Lewenstein, Francesca Manuela Davis and Elsa Hannchen Guidotti filed suit against Bayerische Landesbank (BLB) for the restitution of Kandinsky's Das Bunte Leben.

[56][57] Note: Several sections of this article have been translated from its French version: Theoretical writings on art, The Bauhaus and The great synthesis artistic periods.