Where can you see Wassily Kandinsky in New York?

At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: Composition 8, Several Circles and Blue Mountain. At the Museum of Modern Art: Panels for Edwin R. Campbell. Museums move and lend their works, so check before a special journey.

What is Wassily Kandinsky's most famous work in New York?

Composition 8, of 1923, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Circles, triangles and ruled lines scattered across a pale ground two metres wide, painted in his first year at the Bauhaus. It was the first Kandinsky that Guggenheim bought.

When and where was Wassily Kandinsky born?

On 16 December 1866, at Moscow, Russia. Wassily Kandinsky died on 13 December 1944, at Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, aged about 78.

What is Wassily Kandinsky known for?

One of the first painters of purely abstract pictures. Taught at the Bauhaus for eleven years. The Guggenheim owns more than 150 of his works. Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter, of Abstract art.

Painter, 1866 to 1944

Wassily Kandinsky

Solomon Guggenheim met Kandinsky in 1930, bought Composition 8, and went on buying for the rest of his life. The museum that carries his name began as a home for this one painter's idea: a picture that represents nothing.

Born: 1866, Moscow, Russia
Died: 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Movement: Abstract art
In New York: 4 works in 2 museums

Where to see Wassily Kandinsky in New York

Each work with the museum it hangs in. Museums move and lend their works, so check before a special journey.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum3 works

Composition 8
1923
Circles, triangles and ruled lines scattered across a pale ground two metres wide, painted in his first year at the Bauhaus. It was the first Kandinsky that Guggenheim bought.
Several Circles
1926
Discs of colour float and overlap on black, like planets. The circle, he wrote, was the form that held the most possibilities.
Blue Mountain
1908 to 1909
Three riders gallop under a blue peak between a red tree and a yellow one. He had not yet let go of the subject, but colour is already doing the work.

The Museum of Modern Art1 work

Panels for Edwin R. Campbell
1914
Four tall abstract canvases made for the hall of a New York apartment, his only American commission. The museum reunited them.

The life of Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866 and was a teacher of law before he gave it up at thirty to study painting in Munich. About 1911 he began to paint pictures with no subject at all, among the first in Europe, and wrote a book to explain why colour and form could move the spirit as music does. He taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 until the Nazis closed it, and died in France.

The German painter Hilla Rebay, who advised Guggenheim, believed that this art was the future, and the collection she built for him opened to the public in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. Twenty years later it moved into the building Frank Lloyd Wright designed for it.

What to know

One of the first painters of purely abstract pictures
Taught at the Bauhaus for eleven years
The Guggenheim owns more than 150 of his works

Born: 16 December 1866, Moscow, Russia
Died: 13 December 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France