Wassily Kandinsky in the context of "Weimar"

The Staatliches Bauhaus (German: [ˈʃtaːtlɪçəs ˈbaʊˌhaʊs] ), commonly known as the Bauhaus (German for 'building house'), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts. The school became famous for its approach to design, which attempted to unify individual artistic vision with the principles of mass production and emphasis on function.

The Bauhaus was founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar. It was grounded in the idea of creating a Gesamtkunstwerk ("comprehensive artwork") in which all the arts would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style later became one of the most influential currents in modern design, modernist architecture, and architectural education. The Bauhaus movement had a profound influence on subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. Staff at the Bauhaus included prominent artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Gunta Stölzl, and László Moholy-Nagy at various points.

Western esotericism and the arts surveys documented intersections between Western esotericism—notably Hermeticism, Christian Kabbalah, Alchemy, and Astrology—and the visual arts, literature, and the performing arts from the late Middle Ages to the present. Scholarship highlights recurring vectors: Renaissance and early modern image–text programmes (emblems, alchemical series, Kabbalistic diagrams) that formalised "operative images"; encyclopedic displays and diagrams in early modern erudition; nineteenth-century Spirit photography and related "psychic" image technologies; fin de siècle milieux linking occult orders with salon culture; early twentieth-century abstraction tied to Theosophy/Anthroposophy; ritual poetics on stage and in experimental film; and later artist-authored Tarot and neo-alchemical process art.

Aby Warburg's reading of the Palazzo Schifanoia frescoes in Ferrara established a foundational model for interpreting astrological programs in Renaissance art, while Barbara Obrist documented the late-medieval shift toward serial illustration and diagrammatic representation in alchemical manuscripts. Early modern encyclopedic projects—epitomized by Athanasius Kircher—wove hieroglyphs, cosmology, and spectacular display into ambitious image-systems that influenced the period's visual culture. In parallel, historians of science and craft have emphasized how chymistry's "wider worlds" intersected with literature, theatre, and the visual arts. Classic studies have traced how esoteric metaphysics and "spiritual" aesthetics contributed to early abstraction (e.g., Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint), while recent scholarship reassesses the role of Spiritualism/Spiritism within abstract art and Surrealism's image-making and poetics.

Vasili, Vasily, Vasilii or Vasiliy (Russian: Василий) is a Russian masculine given name of Greek origin and corresponds to Basil. It may refer to:

• Vasily I of Moscow Grand Prince from 1389–1425
• Vasily II of Moscow Grand Prince from 1425–1462
• Vasili III of Russia Grand Prince from 1505–1533
• Vasili IV of Russia Tsar from 1606–1610
• Basil Fool for Christ (1469–1557), also known as Saint Basil, or Vasily Blazhenny
• Vasily Alekseyev (1942–2011), Soviet weightlifter
• Vasily Arkhipov (1926–1998), Soviet Naval officer in the Cuban Missile Crisis
• Vasily Boldyrev (1875–1933), Russian general
• Vasily Chapayev (1887–1969), Russian Army commander
• Vasily Chuikov (1900–1982), Soviet marshal
• Vasily Degtyaryov (1880–1949), Russian weapons designer and Major General
• Vasily Dzhugashvili (1921–1962), Stalin's son
• Vasili Golovachov (born 1948), Russian science fiction author
• Vasily Grossman (1905–1964), Soviet writer and journalist
• Vasily Ignatenko (1961–1986), Soviet firefighter in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster
• Vasilii Alekseevich Iskovskikh (1939–2009), Russian mathematician
• Vasily Kuznetsov (1901–1990), Soviet politician, acted three times as head of state of USSR
• Vasyl Ivanchuk (born 1969), Ukrainian chess grandmaster
• Wassily Kandinsky (Vasily Kandinsky; 1866–1944), Russian painter and art theorist.
• Vasily Karatygin (1802–1880), Russian actor
• Vasily Lanovoy (1934–2021), Russian actor
• Vasily Livanov (born 1935), Russian actor and screenwriter
• Vasily Lobanov (born 1947), Russian composer and pianist
• Vasyl Lomachenko (Vasily Lomachenko; born 1988), Ukrainian boxer
• Vasily Markovich (born 1955), Belarusian politician
• Vasily Nezabitovsky (1824–1883), Ukrainian jurist
• Vasily Petrenko (born 1976), Russian conductor
• Vasily Podkolzin (born 2001), Russian ice hockey player currently playing for the Vancouver Canucks
• Vasily Seseman (1884–1963), Russian and Lithuanian philosopher
• Vasily Smyslov (1921–2010), Soviet chess player
• Vasily Tsibliyev (born 1954), Russian cosmonaut
• Vasily Zaytsev, Soviet sniper
• Vasily Zakharov (1934–2023), Soviet culture minister
• Vasily Zhdanov (born 1963), Soviet cyclist

Hilma af Klint (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈhɪ̂lːma ˈɑːv ˈklɪnːt]; 26 October 1862 – 21 October 1944) was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings are considered to be among the first major abstract works in Western art history. A considerable body of her work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. She belonged to a group called "The Five", a circle of women inspired by Theosophy who shared a belief in the importance of trying to contact the "High Masters", often through séances. Her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, were a visual representation of complex spiritual ideas.

The Russian avant-garde was a large, influential wave of avant-garde modern art that flourished in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, approximately from 1890 to 1930—although some have placed its beginning as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960. The term covers many separate, but inextricably related, art movements that flourished at the time; including Suprematism, Constructivism, Russian Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Zaum, Imaginism, and Neo-primitivism. In Ukraine, many of the artists who were born, grew up or were active in what is now Belarus and Ukraine (including Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandra Ekster, Vladimir Tatlin, David Burliuk, Alexander Archipenko), are also classified in the Ukrainian avant-garde.

The Russian avant-garde reached its creative and popular height in the period between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and 1932, at which point the ideas of the avant-garde clashed with the newly emerged state-sponsored direction of Socialist Realism.

The term expressionism "was probably first applied to music in 1918, especially to Schoenberg", because like the painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) he avoided "traditional forms of beauty" to convey powerful feelings in his music. Theodor Adorno interprets the expressionist movement in music as seeking to "eliminate all of traditional music's conventional elements, everything formulaically rigid". This he sees as analogous "to the literary ideal of the 'scream.' " As well Adorno sees expressionist music as seeking "the truthfulness of subjective feeling without illusions, disguises or euphemisms". Adorno also describes it as concerned with the unconscious, and states that "the depiction of fear lies at the centre" of expressionist music, with dissonance predominating, so that the "harmonious, affirmative element of art is banished". Expressionist music would "thus reject the depictive, sensual qualities that had come to be associated with impressionist music. It would endeavor instead to realize its own purely musical nature—in part by disregarding compositional conventions that placed 'outer' restrictions on the expression of 'inner' visions".

Expressionist music often features a high level of dissonance, extreme contrasts of dynamics, constant changing of textures, "distorted" melodies and harmonies, and angular melodies with wide leaps.

Anton Ažbe (30 May 1862 – 5 or 6 August 1905) was a Slovene realist painter and teacher of painting. Ažbe, crippled since birth and orphaned at the age of eight, learned painting as an apprentice to Janez Wolf and at the Academies in Vienna and Munich. At the age of 30, Ažbe founded his own school of painting in Munich that became a popular attraction for Eastern European students. Ažbe trained the "big four" Slovenian impressionists (Rihard Jakopič, Ivan Grohar, Matej Sternen, Matija Jama), a whole generation of Russian painters (Ivan Bilibin, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Igor Grabar, Wassily Kandinsky, Dmitry Kardovsky and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, to name a few), Serbian painters Nadežda Petrović, Beta Vukanović, Ljubomir Ivanović, Borivoje Stevanović, Kosta Miličević, and Milan Milovanović, the Hungarian painter Sándor Ziffer or a Czech painter Ludvik Kuba.

Ažbe's training methods were adopted by Beta and Rista Vukanović when they took over Kiril Kutlik's atelier and school and by Russian artists both at home (Grabar, Kardovsky) and in emigration (Bilibin, Dobuzhinsky).

Gabriele Münter (19 February 1877 – 19 May 1962) was a German expressionist painter who was at the forefront of the Munich avant-garde in the early 20th century. She studied and lived with the painter Wassily Kandinsky and was a founding member of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter.