Kandinsky's colourful life

Wassily Kandinsky is credited with having created the world's first abstract painting. Now an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris brings together the three main collections of his disparate body of work for the first time

GREEN, BLUE, yellow, pink, red, purple, black and white seem to explode from the canvas. The colours shimmer like reflections on water, resonate like the dissonant notes of Ravel's music. Could those be flowers on the lower right? The circle a human head? It's hard to resist seeking forms in abstract art, and with Kandinsky one is never certain that all figuration has been definitively banished.

Kandinsky's Painting With a Circle(1911) is considered the world's first abstract painting, though it was several years before the painter's assistant wrote on the back of it: "First non-objective." The historic work, which now belongs to the National Museum of Georgia, was considered lost during the reign of the Soviet Union. It can be seen until August 10th, along with 100 other Kandinsky paintings, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Kandinsky told his pupil and mistress Gabriele Münter that he'd been thinking of "painting without objects" since his youth in Moscow. Kandinsky wanted the public to strain to see what he'd hidden. As he progressed towards abstraction, the horses, archers and mountains of his early works fade to mere allusions. Later, fascinated by science, he would decorate his canvases with fantastical forms evoking microscopic creatures, cuneiform, hieroglyphs or an astronomer's view of the heavens.

Many of Kandinsky's early compositions concentrated forms and colours at the top. "For years, Kandinsky's canvases were hung upside down," notes Christian Derouet, curator of the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. "Aesthetic habits had not accustomed people to looking at top-heavy canvases." The success of the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, which is attracting up to 8,000 visitors daily, shows how much aesthetic sensibilities have evolved in the last century. To accommodate crowds, opening hours had to be extended until 11pm.

THIS IS THE first time that the three main collections of the artist's work, from the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Centre Pompidou, have been brought together, spanning the artist's entire career.

The distribution of Kandinsky's work over three museums reflects his life story. The artist's early work was kept by Münter, with whom he lived from 1904 until 1914. The American millionaire Solomon Guggenheim purchased his first Kandinsky paintings, including Composition VIII, when he visited the artist in Germany in 1930. Guggenheim would snap up much of what the Nazis rejected as "degenerate art", including the finest Kandinsky paintings. The painter's widow Nina gave her collection to the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

The brilliant colours of Kandinsky's "impressions" and "improvisations" - of which he painted some 200 between 1910 and 1914 - constitute the best known period of his extremely varied oeuvre. He described his wonder at opening tubes of paint as a child: "Those strange beings we call colours came out one after another, living in and for themselves, autonomous, endowed with all the qualities needed for their future autonomous life and ready at any moment to mingle with one another and form new combinations, blending into each other to create an infinity of new worlds." Kandinsky was fascinated by theosophy, a late 19th-century search for spirituality that incorporated aspects of Buddhism and Brahmanism. In his paintings, he sought to express inner meaning, as opposed to the superficial reality shown by repesentational art.

WASSILY KANDINSKY WAS born in Moscow in 1866. His father was a tea trader from eastern Siberia, his mother from a wealthy Moscow family. He studied law at Moscow University, married his cousin Ania and seemed destined for a quiet life as a professor. But in 1896, at the age of 30, he decided to become a painter. He took his wife to Munich and the couple settled in the artistic neighbourhood of Schwabing. But Ania tired of the Bohemian life - and doubtless of Kandinsky's relationship with Münter. She returned to Moscow in 1904. The couple divorced in 1911.

Kandinsky's earliest paintings were marked by his love of Russian and German folklore. His Couple on Horseback (1906-1907) is the most romantic painting imaginable. The Colourful Life(1907), painted in the same, almost pointillist style against a dark background, contains Kandinsky's favourite themes: the onion domes of the Kremlin, a horseman, an oarsman rowing.

Kandinsky and Münter travelled for four years in Europe and north Africa. On their return, she purchased a house in the countryside at Murnau, where most of the German avant-garde congregated. It was a prolific period for Kandinsky, during which his work shows the influence of Van Gogh, Gauguin and the Fauves, for example in The Blue Mountain(1908-1909), in which trees are bright yellow and red, horsemen pink and green.

In Lyrical(1911), one must look closely to see the horse and rider galloping furiously across the canvas, as if pursued by the dark forms behind and above them. The spare outline of the horse reminds one of prehistoric cave art.

Kandinsky was active in successive artistic groups. In 1911, with his friend Franz Marc, he founded Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Horseman). This brief, brilliant period in German art ended with the onset of the first World War. "The Blaue Reiter was two people: Franz Marc and me," Kandinsky wrote after Marc was killed at Verdun. "My friend is dead. I do not want to continue alone." The German expressionist August Macke, a member of the Blaue Reiter, described Kandinsky as "a very strange fellow, though with an exceptional talent for stimulating all the artists who came under his influence. There was something singularly mystic, or fantastic, about him, together with a certain pathos and, of course, his dogmatism."

As a Russian citizen, Kandinsky had to return to Moscow when the war started. Conditions were difficult and he painted little. In Moscow I(1916), he reverts to the bright, blue-dominated palette of The Colourful Life. But by fragmenting and recomposing the city's houses and domes, he has entered the 20th century.

Kandinsky claimed to be able to "hear" colours and "see" sounds. He painted Impression III(Concert) in 1911, the day after a concert of his friend Arnold Schönberg's atonal music. During his Bauhaus years (1922-1933), he designed the decor and costumes for a production of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. In 1917, at the age of 51, Kandinsky married Nina Andreevskaya, who was 27 years his junior. "We fell in love at first sight, and for that reason we were never apart for one day," she wrote in her memoirs. Kandinsky worked for the Soviet government, establishing a fine arts academy and 22 regional museums. He and Nina went to Berlin on a semi-official mission at the end of 1921, and never returned.

The architect Walter Gropius invited Kandinsky to join the Bauhaus in Weimar. The school was a centre of modernism and experimentation in the arts. It advocated simplified forms, and harmony between function and design. But it was distrusted by conservative Germans, who drove it from Weimar to Dessau to Berlin, before it was shut down by the Nazis in 1933.

At the Bauhaus, Kandinsky formed a close friendship with the painter Paul Klee. For his 60th birthday in 1926, his fellow professors gave him works of art, which are on exhibit at the Centre Pompidou.

Kandinsky's Few Circles(1926) conveys a sort of cosmic harmony and is considered the most representative of his Bauhaus period. In a letter to an art historian friend, he wrote that the circle was "(1) the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally; (2) a precise but inexhaustible variable; (3) simultaneously stable and unstable; (4) simultaneously loud and soft; (5) a single tension that carries countless tensions within it".

IN 1933, THE Kandinskys moved to the Paris suburb of Neuilly, where they would remain until his death in December 1944. Kandinsky had the rare distinction of having been a citizen of Russia, Germany and France. During the German occupation of France, he turned down an offer of asylum in the US.

In Paris, Kandinsky's friends were the Delaunays, Léger, Miró, Mondrian, Chagall, Max Ernst and Brancusi. The surrealists acknowledged his influence, and some art critics classified Kandinsky's work as surrealist.

From here on, Kandinsky's paintings were a blend of pure abstraction, surrealism and biological and zoological motifs borrowed from natural science. The effect is enigmatic, often humorous. Kandinsky considered Dominant Curve(1936) one of the most important paintings of his Paris period. In photographs of his artist's studio after Kandinsky's death from pneumonia, two paintings were set on easels on either side of the dead painter: Movement I(1935) and Mutual Agreement(1942), the last full-size canvas he painted.

Abstract painting would flourish in the decades after Kandinsky, and the psychedelic art of the 1960s and 70s owed much to him. At age 60, Kandinsky said he wished to live at least another 50 years "in order to be able to delve into art ever more deeply". He complained that "one is forced to give up much too soon . . . But perhaps one will be able to continue in the great beyond."

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Kandinskyis at the Centre Pompidou, 11am-11pm daily except Tuesday, until Aug 10. www.centrepompidou.fr