Wassily Kandinsky

Known for: the first abstract paintings; Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911)

Wassily Kandinsky is generally credited as the painter who produced the first fully abstract work — a 1910 watercolor with no recognizable subject — and spent the following three decades developing a theory of the correspondence between color, form, and musical experience. He taught at the Bauhaus alongside Paul Klee and produced his most systematic paintings there, including the Compositions series. He also wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), the most influential theoretical text on abstract painting.