Wassily Kandinsky was a russian writer and painter born in 1866. He is credited with painting one of the first purely abstract works.  He taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933.

In his writings, Kandinsky analyzed the geometrical elements which make up every painting—the point and the line. He called the physical support and the material surface on which the artist draws or paints the basic plane.  He did not analyze them objectively, but from the point of view of their inner effect on the observer.