Masters of modern art from the Hermitage

Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky worked in Germany for many years from 1896, absorbing and producing some of the most electrifying currents in avant-garde modernism while with the Blue Rider Group. In 1905 he was in Paris, watching firsthand the shock emergence of the fauves. His pioneering explorations into abstraction took off, extending way beyond the territories of fauvism, cubism, futurism. He believed that colours and forms alone, freed from representation, could have an aesthetic, affective impact on us; could stir our spirit, like music. Even in early expressive works with traditional compositions, such as ‘View of Murnau: landscape with a green house’ from 1908, he uses colour in a wildly innovative way. Kandinsky carried these ideas back with him to Moscow at the start of war in 1914. With the subsequent Russian Revolution, he was very active, teaching and setting up new cultural organisations. However, he was ultimately more interested in painting as a pathway to spiritual reality than mere ideology, and he returned to Germany in 1921 to work with the Bauhaus. He left behind a number of his most important works and, in 1948, they joined the avant-garde French pictures in the Museum of Modern Western Art formed by the nationalisation of the Shchukin and Morozov collections. There they remained taboo for decades: way too radical to be displayed while Stalin ruled.