The Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944) is the most famous artist associated with the Bauhaus, and is considered one of the originators of Western abstract art. Born in Moscow and raised in present-day Ukraine, he was already a law professor when he took up painting at 30. He moved to Germany to study art, returning to Russia in the years around WWI, then teaching at the Bauhaus from 1922-1933 when it was closed by the Nazis and he fled to France.