Describes how his creative life was profoundly shaped by a neurological condition called synesthesia which caused him to experienced colors as sounds and sounds as colors.

Intellectual, emotional, restless, dogged, loyal, selfish; Kandinsky was an artist - and a man - of contradictions. This genre-defying painter didn't pick up a brush until he was thirty years old. He was an academic with a promising career that he threw away to explore the arts.

The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), who later lived in Germany and France, is one of the pioneers of 20th-century art. Nowadays he is regarded as the founder of abstract art and is, moreover, the chief theoretician of this type of painting. Together with Franz Marc and others he founded the group of artists known as the "Blane Reiter" in Munich. His art then freed itself more and more from the object, eventually culminating in the First...