Over the course of his artistic career, Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) transformed not only his own style, but the course of art history. From early figurative and landscape painting, he went on to pioneer a spiritual, emotive, rhythmic use of color and line and is today credited with creating the first purely abstract work.

As much a teacher and theorist as he was a practicing artist, Kandinsky's interests in music, theater, poetry, philosophy, ethnology, myth, and the occult, were all essential components to his painting and engraving. He was involved with both the influential Blaue Reiter and Bauhaus groups and left a legacy not only of dazzling visual work, but also of highly influential treatises such as Concerning the Spiritual In Art. Key tenets included the connections between painting, music and mystical experience, and the purification of art away from material realism and towards an emotional expression, condensed in particular by color.

This book presents key Kandinsky works to introduce his repertoire of vivid colors, forms, and feelings. Tracing the artist's radical stylistic development, it shows how one painter's progression paved the way for generations of abstract expression to come.

哈喬•杜汐汀（Hajo Düchting）曾在慕尼黑學習藝術史、哲學以及建築學， 1981年，在慕尼黑獲得博士學位，學位論文研究羅伯特•德勞內的《窗》係列。在從事博物館和成人教育方麵的工作後，他轉嚮教學職位，並在慕尼黑、卡塞爾、萊比锡、薩爾布呂肯、美因茨等多所大學擔任客座教授。杜汐汀發錶過大量關於現代繪畫、色彩理論以及藝術教學的文章，並且為Taschen齣版社撰寫過數本著作。