Wassily Kandinsky is most renowned for being a leader of the Blaue Reiter group of artists in South Germany.Having studied Economics and Law at University in Moscow, he gave this up at the age of thirty and moved to Munich where he studied art, first at a private school and then, in 1900, at the academy in Munich.From 1901-04 he belonged to a group of artists called 'Phalanx', and in 1909 he founded the Neue Kunstler Vereinigung, of which he was the president.At this time he was living partly in Munich and partly in Murnau with Gabriele Munter.In 1911 he set up the editorial board of the Almenach Der Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc.After the outbreak of the First World War he went first to Switzerland, then to Moscow, before returning to Germany in 1921 with his second wife Nina.In 1922 he moved to Weimar, where he became a professor at the Bauhaus, and founded 'Die Blauen Vier' (The Blue Four), with Feininger, Klee and Jawlensky.When the Bauhaus was closed in 1933 he moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, where except for a short stay in the Pyrenees (to avoid the invading Germans) he lived until his death in 1944.Kandinsky's early work is very much influenced by the prevailing Jugenstil tendencies. This, combined with his interest in primitive and local art and his extraordinary sense of colour result in a unique and exquisite early folk style, which then flows effortlessly towrads abstraction before culminating in the geometric works of the Bauhaus and later period.