Wassily Wasilyevich Kandinsky, 1866-1944: was born on December, 16th, 1866 in Moscow, in a well-to-do family of a businessman in a good cultural environment. In 1871 the family moved to Odessa where his father ran his tea factory. There, alongside with attending a classical gymnasium (grammar school), the boy learned to play the piano and the cello and took to drawing with a coach. "I remember that drawing and a little bit later painting lifted me out of the reality", he wrote later. In Kandinsky's works of his childhood period we can find rather specific color combinations, which he explained by the fact that "each color lives by its mysterious life". He was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat—he began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30. In 1896 Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbe's private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts. He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Kandinsky was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow, and returned to Germany in 1921. There, he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived the rest of his life, became a French citizen in 1939, and produced some of his most prominent art. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944. Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist supposed to have painted the world's first purely abstract pieces of art. Though he did not begin studying or producing paintings until the age of 30, he is respected as one of the most profound and influential painters in all of history. Kandinsky split his time between Moscow and Munich, and was a part of the Bauhaus school in Germany for more than a decade. Kandinsky, throughout a long and tempermental development, remained devoted to depicting personal experience through expressive techniques. He called his devotion to the beauty inherent in all things “inner necessity.” (This information is from: www.wassilykandinsky.net)