Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter and leading pioneer of 20th century abstract art. Having abandoned his post lecturing in Law at the University of Moscow, he decided upon a career as an artist after seeing a painting from Monet’s Haystack series. He trained at art school in Munich, followed by several years of travel and experimentation with various aesthetic styles. On returning to Germany, he spent the next few years moving increasingly towards complete abstraction as he stripped away all traces of representation within his paintings. In 1911, he become a central figure within Der Blaue Reiter group, which believed art to be a form of spiritual escape from worldly materialism. He had a huge impact as a teacher at the Bauhaus School in Weimar, but was forced to leave Germany for Paris with the rise of the Nazis. His radically abstract work and theories about art as a vehicle for inner emotions would profoundly shape the course of Modernist painting.