It’s remarkable how many inventions are happy accidents. Consider the 3M scientist who was trying to invent a stronger adhesive. He unwittingly produced a weaker, reusable substance that evolved into the Post-It Note.

Or how about the engineer who was designing springs to stabilize the equipment on ships. He accidentally knocked over a prototype, which began to “walk” across the floor. It inspired a world-famous toy called The Slinky.

Then there’s Wassily Kandinsky, who longed to create paintings that would move people as profoundly as music does. Returning to his studio one evening, he found himself face to face with a painting accidentally displayed sideways. This chance encounter became a catalyst for the invention of abstract art.

A traveler between two worlds

Kandinsky was born in Russia, where he studied law but it didn’t excite him the way color did. At the age of thirty he left the legal profession behind, moving from Moscow to Munich to join a fine art reproduction company.

Around the same time, he enrolled in a drawing class taught by Germany’s foremost draughtsman, Franz von Stuck.

Struck cured my pernicious inability to finish a picture with one single utterance. He told me that I worked too nervously, that I singled out the interesting bits right away.

Wassily Kandinsky, quoted in “Kandinsky” by José María Faerna (1994)

Even so, Kandinsky had mixed feelings about drawing classes, especially the life-drawing sessions he dismissed as “expressionless.” So he made the most of every free moment to paint colorful landscapes.

He painted the undeniably romantic town of Rothenburg, Germany, entirely from memory. The canvas Old Town II exemplifies his deepening conviction that it’s color—not subject matter—that conveys emotion in art.

Introducing the Blue Rider

One year later Kandinsky debuted The Blue Rider, a mysterious horseman who would become the defining symbol of his career. He conceptualized the rider as a modern-day Saint George, the dragon slayer, but with a twist: His rider was on a quest to conquer the dragon of materialism.

In his essays, Kandinsky argued that the “nightmare of materialism” reduced human existence to a series of hollow rituals. He believed this shift left painting languishing in superficiality.

He chose the color blue due to its deep spiritual associations—a tradition reaching back to the 14th century, when Giotto famously used blue to represent everlasting life in his seminal Arena Chapel frescoes.

Importantly, at this point in his career Kandinsky still hasn’t figured out how to portray the human experience on canvas without incorporating figures and objects from the material world.

With the benefit of a century of hindsight, I think his next step seems obvious. In reality, his journey to abstraction would require ten years of self-reflection, experimentation, and the ongoing refinement of theoretical ideas in scholarly publications.

Painting memories of Old Russia

While in Munich, Kandinsky often recalled his childhood fascination with the domes of Moscow glowing in the evening light. ‘To paint this hour,” he said, “must be the biggest, the most impossible happiness for an artist.”

Accordingly, Riding Couple depicts two lovers on horseback beneath a canopy of autumn leaves at twilight. Across the river, the Moscow skyline appears like a long-lost fantasy—a nod to the Russian folktale that inspired the work.

In the story, a chivalrous knight rescues the beautiful Elena from a firebird, an enchanted creature that serves as both a blessing and a harbinger of doom.

Kandinsky was hoping this image would convey a spirituality that transcends cultural boundaries. However, because folktales are deeply rooted in the origin stories of individual societies, he would need to keep looking for a truly universal visual language.

Reimagining color and form

To that end, he began traveling throughout Europe. For nearly a year he lived in a village near Paris, where he saw paintings by Fauve artists Henri Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck, whose colors he called “jarring and luminous.”

In Paris, a radical idea was in the air: Could artists of the 20th century develop a new understanding of form that would supersede the obsessive detail found in earlier art movements?

Kandinsky carried that idea with him when he returned to Germany in 1908. He was turning the page on a chapter of his life filled with artistic struggles, a failing marriage, and bouts of severe depression.

He eventually settled into an apartment in Munich and a summer house in the Alpine foothills, where he enjoyed a period of steady creativity alongside his paramour, German expressionist painter Gabriele Münter.

The painting Blue Mountain is a key work in his step-by-step transition to abstraction. Here, an unnaturally blue mountain frames three riders galloping across a whimsical autumn landscape.

A similar canvas, Mountain, reveals an even greater flattening of perspective. Storytelling elements—like the rider on a white horse who meets a mysterious figure—are becoming more impressionistic as the material world fades rapidly from Kandinsky’s pictures.

The universal language of music

To fully appreciate Kandinsky’s artistic evolution, it helps to understand why he called music the “ultimate teacher.” He envied the way a melody could trigger emotion without the support of lyrics.

Also, he had a neurological condition called synesthesia in which the senses overlap. When he saw color, he heard music. When he heard the music of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, he saw wild bursts of color:

The violins, the deep tones of the basses, and especially the wind instruments embodied for me the Blue Hour. I saw all the colors in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.

Wassily Kandinsky, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” (1911)

After attending the 1911 premier of Arnold Schoenberg’s radically atonal music in Munich, Kandinsky was inspired to paint Impression III (Concert). In this work, a wave of disquieting yellow paint surges past the silhouette of a black grand piano. A lively mix of lines and colors captures the audience leaning into the music.

Kandinsky began approaching the canvas like a stage, conducting a symphony of color. He soon formalized this connection by using titles like “Composition” and “Improvisation” to describe pictures that prioritize harmony and contrast over material objects, as seen in the semi-abstract Improvisation 26 (Rowing).

In Black Lines, one of the artist’s first forays into pure abstraction, vibrant ovals drift across the canvas beneath a frenzy of agitated black lines. This work portrays a collision of two worlds through color and form alone, a fitting reflection of 1913, a year when worlds were truly colliding.

Geopolitically, an era of stability was nearing its end, soon to be demolished by World War I. That same year, astronomers discovered that the massive Andromeda Galaxy might be on a collision course with our own Milky Way.

Abstraction for its own sake was of no interest to Kandinsky. His images from 1910 to 1913 can be deciphered, and they were meant to be. Just what they mean is another matter.

Art critic Robert Hughes, “The Shock of the New” (1980)

So, why Kandinsky?

I could argue that a toddler snuck into a 15th-century artist’s workshop, made a big mess, and “invented” abstract art. Yet, I would be missing the point.

The point is that establishing abstract art as a universal language for conveying spiritual and emotional truths was incredibly difficult. A great many art critics condemned these non-representational images as “carnival clowning” and “shameless bluffing.”

Kandinsky understood that founding a new artistic movement would require a collective effort. So he partnered with Franz Marc in 1911 to form Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an avant-garde group of painters who published The Blue Rider Almanac. This landmark publication, with many illustrations by Paul Klee, laid the foundation for abstract art.

Other artists experimented with the dissolution of the object, but Kandinsky was the most logical and consistent in his pursuit of an abstract means of expression. His artistic activities were always accompanied by theoretical reflections and insights.

Art historian Ulrike Becks-Malorny, “Kandinsky,” 1994

Wassily Kandinsky proved that abstract art is far more than mere decoration. Not convinced? Take another look at Black Lines. Produced over a century ago, its frantic energy captures the same geopolitical anxiety I’m feeling today. Do you feel it, too?

Postscript: If you happen to be in New York…

Discover more paintings by Kandinsky at the Guggenheim Museum’s Collection in Focus: Modern European Currents special exhibition. The show runs now through January 10, 2027. Click the link for details.