Kandinsky trained and practiced as a lawyer in his native Russia, but in 1895 he saw Monet’s Haystacks at Giverny at a French Impressionist exhibition. He was so inspired, he moved to Munich to study art in 1897. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider, 1911-14) and began to paint in a completely abstract style. Also an accomplished musician, Kandinsky embraced the concept that color and musical harmony are linked. He used color in a highly theoretical way, associating tone with timbre, hue with pitch and saturation with the volume of sound. He claimed that when he saw color he heard music.

His artwork contained greater abstraction than the Impressionists and it cannot be overstated how much music influenced his paintings, even down to the names of his paintings: Improvisations, Impressions and Compositions. His forms evolved from fluid and organic to geometric and finally, to pictographic. His most enthusiastic supporter was Solomon R. Guggenheim, founder and benefactor of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.