Division －Unité

Wassily Kandinsky, one of the pioneers of the 20th century abstract paintings, was born in Moscow, Russia in 1866. He studied law and economics at the University of Moscow but decided to be a painter after he was shocked by one of Claud Monet’s paintings of Haystacks he saw in a French art exhibition. His early works were heavily influenced by Russian Symbolism and the Berlin Secession. In 1912, Kandinsky founded Blue Rider with Klee and other artists. Kandinsky taught at Bauhaus from 1922 to 1933 but defected to Paris to escape from Nazi persecution. He continued to explore diverse possibilities and potentials of abstract paintings until his last years. When Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis in 1933, Kandinsky, who lost his job, decided to move to Paris on the earnest advice of Marcel Duchamp. In Division - Unite, which was drawn in 1934 when his French period began, geometric figurations and structured compositions are no longer found and replaced by microbe-like organic figurations.