When Kandinsky
was 30, he took up painting and decided to go to Munich to study
life-drawing, sketching and anatomy. He thought this would give
him a basic artistic education. He soon began to surpass the constraints
of the simple art class and began to create work that was extremely
ground-breaking for the time.
Around 1913 Kandinsky began working on paintings that came to
be considered the first totally abstract works in modern art;
for they made no reference to or described objects in the physical
world. In 1911, along with Franz Marc and other German expressionists,
Kandinsky formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) a group of
artists who shared a belief that are should be in the service
of the spiritual and transcendent rather than a description of
the material world.
