Vasily Kandinsky

Kandinsky was extremely influential, not only as one of the pioneers of abstract art, but equally as a theoretician, teacher and organiser. He and Marc led the Blaue Reiter project in Munich. In Moscow, as a post-revolutionary arts supremo, he worked with Rodchenko, Stepanova, Gabo, Pevsner, Popova, Malevich and Tatlin before an ideological split (Goncharova and Larionov kept on writing). Invited by Gropius to a post at the Bauhaus (with Klee a next-door neighbour), he invited his old friend Schoenberg to lead a music department there, though perceived anti-semitism halted the idea. Duchamp pointed him to a home in France.