Nationality: Russian

Birthdate: December 16 1866

Date of Death: December 13 1944

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Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist. He is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art. Born in Moscow, he began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.

In 1896, at the age of 30, Kandinsky gave up a promising career teaching law and economics to enroll in the Munich Academy. He was not immediately granted admission and began learning art on his own. That same year, before leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of paintings by Monet. He was particularly taken with the impressionistic style of Haystacks; to him it had a powerful sense of colour almost independent of the objects themselves.