He Did Not Create The First Abstract Painting

One of the most interesting and key facts to know about Kandinsky and his art is that he did not create the first abstract painting. Wassily Kandinsky is widely recognized as having created the world's first abstract painting. This is the first existing piece in Kandinsky's parallel sequence of abstract "compositions" and "improvisations." Kandinsky left it nameless when he painted it in the early 1910s, but it is now known as the First Abstract Watercolor. It is, without a doubt, one of the first totally abstract pieces of art, but it is not the first. Frantiek Kupka, a Czech painter and graphic designer, was the first to exhibit fully abstract paintings in October 1912. Francis Picabia, a French painter, painted an abstract picture in 1909, long before Kandinsky's thoughts on abstraction were published.

Some consider his watercolor Caoutchouc (Rubber) to be the first fully abstract picture. Hilma af Klint, a Swedish artist and mystic, made her first series of abstract paintings in 1906. Her work, however, was only discovered decades after her death in 1944. As a result, there is debate over who was the first artist in the Western European representational tradition to entirely abandon any connections to well-known forms. It should be emphasized that abstract artworks have long been created in non-Western traditions.