Vassily Kandinsky is a Russian painter and art theorist. Painter, watercolorist, draftsman, engraver, illustrator, painter of sets and ballet costumes. Expressionist, then abstract. Der Blaue Reiter group. Considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century alongside Picasso and Matisse, he is the founder of abstract art: he is generally considered to be the author of the first non-figurative work in the history of modern art, a watercolor from 1910 that would be called "abstract". Some historians or art critics have suspected Kandinsky of having antedated this watercolor to ensure his paternity of abstraction on the pretext that it resembles a sketch of his Composition VII from 1913.