Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was a pioneering Russian painter and art theorist, widely celebrated as one of the founding fathers of pure abstract art. Operating at the forefront of the early 20th-century avant-garde, Kandinsky believed that color and form possessed their own spiritual language capable of directly expressing human emotion. As a co-founder of the highly influential Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) movement in Munich, he fundamentally revolutionized Western art by breaking away from literal representation and guiding the art world into a bold new era of non-objective, expressive modernism.