Kandisky's rich, trail-blazing work and complex personality have compelled attention ever since the controversy surrounding his first abstract paintings of 1911, when the press labelled him a "bluffer" and a "madman." In his native Russia, the Communists ostracized him as a "formalist," while the Nazis exhibited his work as "Degenerate Art." Member of the Blaue Reiter and the Bauhaus, close ally of Franz Marc and Paul Klee, Kandinsky influenced virtually...