As a student, Kandinsky studied law and economics, but he changed direction after seeing Monet’s Haystacks and hearing Wagner’s Lohengrin. He could see colours when he heard music, and vice versa, colour became music. It was this extraordinary recognition that helped him evoke such huge emotion in his paintings.

He was born in Russia to a family of tea traders with aristocratic roots and taught himself to draw before moving to Munich in 1896 to study art at the Academy of Fine Arts. A passionate enthusiast of philosophy and spirituality, his work began to influence his thinking, and his art gradually distanced itself from mere representation.

Kandinsky returned to Moscow in 1914. After the 1917 Revolution, he joined the Bauhaus in Weimar and later moved with the school to Dessau, becoming a German citizen in 1928.

But the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis in 1933, and he moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, just outside Paris. A few years later, his work was declared “degenerate” in Germany. Although he never felt fully embraced by the Paris art scene as he had in Germany, these final years were artistically important: his painting softened, forms became more organic, and colour took on a lighter, more lyrical quality.

It was during this period that he also explored lithography, including work associated with the Mourlot circle, helping to carry his abstract ideas into print at a moment when painting alone was no longer enough.