Sketch for Painting with White Border

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky English pronunciation: /kænˈdɪnski/ was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat—he began painting... studies 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. He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Kandinsky was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow, and returned to Germany in 1921. 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 the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939.
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The Phillips Collection is an art museum founded by Duncan Phillips in 1921 as the Phillips Memorial Gallery located in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Phillips was the grandson of James H. Laughlin, a banker and co-founder of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Among the artists represented in the collection are Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gustave Courbet, El Greco, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso,... Georges Braque, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Klee, Arthur Dove, Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, Jacob Lawrence, Augustus Vincent Tack, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Mark Rothko. Duncan Phillips played a seminal role in introducing America to modern art. Born in Pittsburgh—the grandson of James Laughlin, a banker and co-founder of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company — Phillips and his family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1895. He, along with his mother, established The Phillips Memorial Gallery after the sudden, untimely deaths of his father, Duncan Clinch Phillips , a Pittsburgh window glass millionaire, and brother, James Laughlin Phillips .
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