Kandinsky: Labelled 'degenerate' by the Nazis

Russian-born Kandinsky came late to art. Inspired by a Monet painting, he gave up a career in teaching at 29 and moved to Munich, then a vibrant centre of the avant garde. This delayed start may have made the artist self-conscious about his vocation - he certainly lacked the brashness and vigour of many in the German art world.

While others launched salvos against the bourgeois sensibilities of Imperial Germany, his work reflected little interest in the politics of the day. Along with his colleagues in the influential (if short-lived) group Der Blauereiter, Kandinsky explored first the nostalgic themes of folk art and later the properties of form and colour themselves.

Hearing the inner voice

Tranquil art masks his turbulent times (Untitled, 1921)

Kandinsky envied music's freedom to express and provoke emotions without mimicking elements outside itself. His move from representation towards abstraction marked a new chapter in modern art, where he believed the "inner voice" could be made to be heard without the need to depict the object.

The First World War rudely interrupted this platonic vision. Dubbed an enemy alien, Kandinsky fled his adopted home for Moscow. This exile did not stymie his development, indeed exposure to the increasingly confident Russian avant garde influenced his art greatly. Fuelled by revolutionary fervour, many Soviet artists declared abstraction the art of the proletarian future. Taking their lead from engineering and the machine age they helped infuse Kandinsky's work with geometric forms in place of his organic swirls.

Despite the spirit of the times, Kandinsky found politics as alien to his painting as traditional representation. While his championing of abstraction won him admirers and several posts in the Soviet cultural apparatus, he felt by no means immune from the terror of the Revolution. It was with relief that he accepted a teaching post back in Germany in 1921, at the seminal modern art school - the Bauhaus.

Politics turmoil

Revenge! The right-wing backdrop to Kandinsky's art

Away from the privations and fear of the Soviet Union, he felt able to continue his pursuit of the abstract, but again politics intervened. Although slammed by his left-wing students for his intellectualised, apolitical style, Kandinsky became a target for the radical art school's fascist opponents. As the rising tide of Nazism ousted the Bauhaus from one town after another, modern art and it practitioners were increasingly drawn as the agents of anarchy and Bolshevism.

As a final gesture the Bauhaus chose to disband, rather than dismiss the 66-year-old master to appease the newly elected Nazis. For a modern artist with links to Moscow, the Third Reich was far from a secure home, Kandinsky's German citizenship notwithstanding. Suburban Paris was to be his final refuge and he was forced into yet another change of nationality.

Kandinsky's work did not go unseen during Hitler's reign, several of his best canvases appeared in the notorious "Degenerate Art" show - a massively well-attended exhibition lampooning Weimar Germany's almost peerless crop of modern artist.

Exaltation or elevation?

Can Kandinsky rival Monet's popularity?

Little of this political turbulence is visible in the 140 prints, watercolours and woodcuts at the Royal Academy. Kandinsky has long been a sacred cow in art circles - the disavowal of political or social sentiment in his work has appealed to those who like their culture to end at the gallery door. For an artist regarded as a leading light of modern art, his first London exhibition is sure to throw up its fair share of disappointed J'accuse reviews.

Denied the chance to compare these rather modest works on paper with his more exuberant canvases, one risks coming away with a wholly jaundiced view of this doubtless important but often uninspiring figure. His assertion that art which appeals to only a single era was "castrated art", perhaps damns his own work today, at least on paper.

Few of the pieces possess the power to exalt or elevate - Kandinsky's professed aim. The Royal Academy struck gold with its recent Monet exhibition, it remains to see if the crowds will warm to a fellow Monet admirer - for as an artist, Kandinsky makes a great, if not compelling, theorist.

The exhibition continues at London's Royal Academy until 4 July.