In full, this fellow's name is Vasily Vasilyevich Kandinsky, but when he moved to
Germany it was German-ized to Wassily. His style of art is considered a part of
German Expressionism, and with his friend
Franz Marc, created Der Blaue Reiter, or The
Blue Rider as a school of
art. The name came from the entirely
random fact that they both liked the color blue and
horses.
Der Blaue Reiter was a lot more abstract than the other school of German Expressionism, Die Brucke (the bridge). While Die Brucke focused on the distortion of color in otherwise representational works to create an emotional response in the viewer, Der Blaue Reiter stepped almost entirely away from representation in preference to a deliberate 'orchestration' of color, form, line, and space. These ideals were expounded in his 1912 treatise "Concerning the Spiritual in Art"
Kandinsky was an accomplished musician, and often considered his paintings to be a visual representation of music. Many of the works he created were simply entitled "Improvisation" or "Composition", followed by a number. He once claimed that he heard notes of music simply by looking at colors. The color black, for instance, was "like the silence of the body after death, the close of life."
A quote of his concerning the instrumental nature of his art follows. "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another to cause vibrations in the soul."
A decent webpage showcasing several of his works and which proved immensely helpful to me while preparing for my Art History Final (and in creating this node) can be found at:
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/kandinsky/
Most of my other information was gathered from my Art History teacher and the textbook Gardner's Art Through The Ages, eleventh edition.