Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (b. 1866) was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art. Born in Moscow, he began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.

In 1896, Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbe’s private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts. During this time, he was first the teacher and then the partner of German artist Gabriele Münter. He returned to Moscow in 1914 after the outbreak of World War I. Following the Russian Revolution, Kandinsky “became an insider in the cultural administration of Anatoly Lunacharsky” and helped establish the Museum of the Culture of Painting. However, by then, “his spiritual outlook… was foreign to the argumentative materialism of Soviet society” and opportunities beckoned in Germany, to which he returned in 1920. There, he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939 and producing some of his most prominent art. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.

Delicate Tension no. 85 was executed by Kandinsky at the Bauhaus during the prestigious school’s most rationalist period under the directorship of Theo van Doesburg, from 1923 to 1925. During these years the initial Expressionistic style of this avant-garde centre evolved towards greater commitment to the Constructivist aesthetic which was spreading internationally. Kandinsky delved more deeply in his investigation of the correspondences between forms and colours, and the geometric shapes found in his works from this period, which is sometimes described as “cold, ” are basically the circle and the triangle, which he considered to be “the two primary, most strongly contrasting plane figures.”