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A watercolor painting by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky believed to be lost for more than seven decades has sold at auction for $1.4 million. The painting, Gebogene Spitzen (Curved Tips), was painted in 1927 when the expressionist taught at the Bauhaus German school of art. After being recorded as sold in 1949, art historians became unsure of its location. The only proof of its existence was a small sketch of it in a list of his artworks by art historian Vivian Endicott Barnett. Munich auction house Ketterer Kunst said the painting then surfaced in the estate of a private German...

A new exhibition of Wassily Kandinsky's work shows how the artist used his synaesthesia - the capacity to see sound and hear colour - to create the world's first truly abstract paintings. Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky is widely credited with making the world's first truly abstract paintings, but his artistic ambition went even further. He wanted to evoke sound through sight and create the painterly equivalent of a symphony that would stimulate not just the eyes but the ears as well. A new exhibition at Tate Modern, Kandinsky: Path to Abstraction, shows not only how he removed all recognisable subjects...

Okay, today our theme, for this fourth "class," is emotional expressionism. This developed in the first decade of the twentieth century and features Matisse, as a French Expressionist (or Fauvist, if you want to get really picky) and the two branches of German Expressionism: the Bridge and the Blue Rider. They are all inspired by the work of van Gogh and Cezanne which we saw in the last “lesson”: the emotional power of van Gogh and the strong composition of Cezanne. Henri Matisse (1869-1954) dropped out of a career as a lawyer. He became a leader of the Fauves (which...