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# Wassily Kandinsky’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
- URL: https://blog.fineartamerica.com/wassily-kandinsky-ten-most-famous-paintings/
- Published: 2026-07-30T10:42:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-21T18:56:30.000Z
- Description: From fairy-tale riders to floating circles: ten works that trace how Kandinsky talked himself out of painting things and into painting feeling.
- Author: Fine Art America
- Tags: Famous Paintings, Art History

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) came to art late and by a strange route. He trained in law and economics in Moscow, and was already thirty — with a university teaching post in front of him — when he abandoned the whole plan, moved to Munich, and enrolled as a painting student. He never quite lost the analytical habits of his first career. More than almost any other modern artist, he wanted to explain what he was doing, and his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art remains one of the founding documents of abstraction.

His conviction was that color and line could move a viewer directly, the way music does, without having to describe anything. He got there gradually: Russian folk scenes and Bavarian hillsides dissolved, over about six years, into fields of pure color crossed by black lines. Later, teaching at the Bauhaus, he tightened that freedom into circles, grids, and precise geometry. Here are ten of his most famous works, from the fairy-tale beginnings to the floating circles of his Bauhaus years.

## [Riding Couple](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/riding-couple-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Riding Couple by Wassily Kandinsky](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/riding-couple-wassily-kandinsky-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/riding-couple-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Riding Couple (around 1906–07) is Kandinsky at his most enchanted and least abstract. A man on a white horse carries a woman in a richly patterned gown along a riverbank, birch trunks rising around them, a domed city glittering on the far shore. The whole surface is built from small dabs of color that catch the light like mosaic or cloisonné enamel, and the night sky is scattered with gold. It belongs to the Russian fairy-tale world of his early years, before theory took over — but the technique already shows him thinking of paint as pure color, laid down for its own sake rather than to describe a surface.

## [The Colorful Life](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-colorful-life-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Colorful Life by Wassily Kandinsky](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/the-colorful-life-wassily-kandinsky-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-colorful-life-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Painted in 1907 in tempera on canvas, The Colorful Life (Das bunte Leben) is the largest and most ambitious of Kandinsky’s early Russian pictures. A crowd fills the foreground — musicians, lovers, an old beggar, children, a woman in white kneeling in prayer — while a walled town climbs a dark hill behind them. There is no single focus and no consistent scale; figures are spread across the surface like beads on embroidery, the way saints are arranged on a Russian icon. Kandinsky was drawing on medieval Moscow, folk woodcuts, and the peasant art he had studied on an ethnographic expedition in his twenties.

## [Murnau — View from the Window of the Griesbräu](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/murnau-view-from-the-window-of-the-griesbrau-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Murnau — View from the Window of the Griesbräu by Wassily Kandinsky](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/murnau-view-from-the-window-of-the-griesbrau-wassily-kandinsky-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/murnau-view-from-the-window-of-the-griesbrau-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

In 1908 Kandinsky and his companion Gabriele Münter began spending summers at Murnau, a small town in the Bavarian foothills, and the place changed his painting. This view, made from an upstairs window of the Griesbräu inn, looks steeply down a broad street the color of lilac, past pale houses with roofs of orange and deep violet, out to green fields and blue hills beyond. The paint goes on in wide, unmixed strokes, and the shadows are frankly blue. Local subject matter was almost an excuse; what mattered was that a roof could be any color he wanted. The Murnau landscapes are the hinge between the fairy tales and the abstractions.

## [Improvisation 19](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-improvisation-19-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Improvisation 19 by Wassily Kandinsky](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/1-improvisation-19-wassily-kandinsky-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-improvisation-19-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

By 1911 Kandinsky had sorted his output into three categories: Impressions, taken from nature; Improvisations, which came from what he called inner necessity; and Compositions, the large works he planned like symphonies. Improvisation 19 is one of the most beautiful of the middle group — a deep blue field across which a procession of tall, ghostly figures drifts, outlined in loose black strokes and never quite resolving into people. Blue was the color he associated with depth, calm, and the spiritual, and here it does most of the work. The picture is sometimes called Blue Sound, which suits it: you register the mood well before you register the shapes.

## [Improvisation 26 (Rowing)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-improvisation-26-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Improvisation 26 by Wassily Kandinsky](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/2-improvisation-26-wassily-kandinsky-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-improvisation-26-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Improvisation 26 (1912) hangs on three heavy black diagonals that sweep across pools of yellow, rose, and blue. Kandinsky gave it the subtitle Rowing, and once you know it the lines snap into place as oars and the pale mass beneath them as a boat, with what may be two figures leaning into the stroke. That is exactly the balance he was after in these years — enough of a hint to keep the viewer searching, never enough to settle the question. He wanted the picture to work as a sensation first, and only afterward, if at all, as a scene.

## [Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/improvisation-no-30-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Improvisation No. 30 by Wassily Kandinsky](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/improvisation-no-30-wassily-kandinsky-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/improvisation-no-30-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Painted in 1913 and now in the Art Institute of Chicago, this canvas is a whirl of pale pinks, blues, and yellows, with two leaning towers at the upper right, a crowd of small figures at the lower left, and — unmistakably — a cannon on a great black wheel firing at the bottom. Kandinsky insisted to the American collector who bought it that the cannons were incidental, a leftover from the constant talk of war in Europe at the time, and that the painting’s real content lay in its shapes and colors. A year later the war he claimed not to be depicting had begun.

## [Painting with Green Center](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-painting-with-green-center-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Painting with Green Center by Wassily Kandinsky](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/2-painting-with-green-center-wassily-kandinsky-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-painting-with-green-center-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Also from 1913 and also in Chicago, Painting with Green Center is one of the freest things Kandinsky ever made. A soft green core sits near the middle of the canvas, and everything else — wedges of red and blue, drifting whites, a scatter of hard black lines — seems to have been flung outward from it. There is no ground and no horizon; forms float and overlap without any sense of what is in front of what. Kandinsky was working at high speed in these prewar Munich years, and the picture keeps that momentum. It is abstraction as weather rather than as design.

## [Squares with Concentric Circles](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-squares-with-concentric-circles-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Squares with Concentric Circles by Wassily Kandinsky](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/1-squares-with-concentric-circles-wassily-kandinsky-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-squares-with-concentric-circles-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The most reproduced image Kandinsky ever made was never meant to be a finished work at all. Squares with Concentric Circles (1913) is a small study in watercolor and gouache on paper: twelve rectangles, each holding a bullseye of three or four rings, every one a different combination of hues. He was testing how colors behave against each other — how a red ring reads on orange, how green cools a violet ground. Nothing in his output is more immediately likable, and it turns up now on posters, tote bags, and phone cases the world over. The pleasure is real, but it began as homework.

## [Composition 8](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-composition-8-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/2-composition-8-wassily-kandinsky-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-composition-8-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Kandinsky reserved the title Composition for his most considered pictures, and Composition 8 (1923) was the first he painted after joining the Bauhaus. The change from his prewar work is startling. Gone are the smoky blooms of color; in their place are ruled lines, clean triangles, checkerboards, and hovering circles, all set against a pale ground and anchored by a big black disk with a violet halo at the upper left. Years in Russia among the Constructivists had sharpened his taste for geometry. He thought highly of the painting himself, and it remains one of the treasures of the Guggenheim in New York.

## [Several Circles](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/5-several-circles-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Several Circles by Wassily Kandinsky](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/5-several-circles-wassily-kandinsky-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/5-several-circles-wassily-kandinsky.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Several Circles (1926) is the purest statement of Kandinsky’s late years: a black-blue void in which some thirty circles of various sizes hang suspended, overlapping and glowing where they cross. One enormous dark circle ringed in blue dominates the upper middle like an eclipse. By this point he had decided that the circle was the most expressive of all forms — a link, he said, between the cosmic and the human. Painted at the Bauhaus in Dessau, it has the quiet of a night sky and none of the noise of his earlier work, and it is among the most instantly recognizable abstract paintings ever made.

Kandinsky spent forty years arguing that a painting need not be about anything to move you, and his own work is the best evidence he ever produced. The early pictures bring warmth and color to a room; the Bauhaus circles and grids bring calm and order, and hold up beautifully at large scale on a plain wall.

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