Wassily Kandinsky

This portrait of Wassily Kandinsky traces the painter's life and work in Moscow where he painted impressionistic, fairy tale representations of the city to his bold abstract canvases completed in Munich and Paris. Initially a leader in the expressionist Der Blaue Reiter group, Kandinsky abandoned representation altogether in 1910 to become a pioneer of abstract painting. Sensitive to the musical qualities of Kandinsky's work, the filmmaker accompanies the artist's paintings with music of the period. This film-biography uses a surrealist Kandinsky figure to comment on the artist's life and work, from the political and art-historical perspective of the 1980's.