Wassily Kandinsky: Pioneer of Abstraction Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky, born December 4th (Old Style) 1866 in Moscow, Russia, and passing away on December 13th, 1944, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, stands as a monumental figure in the history of art. More than simply a painter, he was a theorist, an innovator, and arguably the first to systematically explore pure abstraction in Western painting. His journey from a young man studying…