‘Lyrical’ (1911) by Wassily Kandinsky, on show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris

When the first Monets arrived in Russia in 1896, those flocking to see them included a 30-year-old Moscow lawyer, who stood transfixed by the “Haystacks”. Wassily Kandinsky perceived at once that the series pointed to the abstraction of colour and form as painting’s future; in response, he quit law and became an art student with big ambitions. “If fate grants me sufficient time, I shall discover a new international language that will be eternal, and will develop infinitely and is not called Esperanto. It is called ‘painting’,” he announced. “Everything done so far is just copying.”

Kandinsky brought a lawyer’s rational mind to his project, combined with a quest towards transcendence that always marked Russian art. He believed the world was on the verge of “The Epoch of Great Spirituality”, when painting would urge people to see beyond objects to immaterial form and art would attain the abstract purity of music.

The retrospective now at Paris’s Pompidou Centre includes many choice works demonstrating how, from the start, Kandinsky painted hazily defined forms in flat saturated blocks of colour: sunflower and cherry-magenta trees flanking “The Blue Mountain”; a scarlet-orange sun burning within a white glacier in “Romantic Landscape”. The chromatic range and intensity is exhilarating: too often, when grouped together, Kandinsky’s attempts to turn symbols into a universal language churn into worthy painterly Esperanto.

‘Moscow 1’ (1916)

The triumph of this exhibition – organised with Munich’s Lenbachhaus and New York’s Guggenheim – is to showcase Kandinsky’s works not narrowly as a progress to abstraction but as variations on a theme as the artist responded to shifting political, social, personal realities, especially life as a triple exile. The largest ever exhibition of his oeuvre, and including most of his best works as well as revelatory studies on paper, it is a humanly appealing interpretation of this cerebral yet romantic artist.

The Lenbachhaus supplies many rich early works, including 1907’s tempera/gouache “The Motley Life”, a mosaic of dabs and dots caught between French pointillism and Russian folk art – bead embroidery, glass painting – depicting medieval Moscow as a paradise. Created during Kandinsky’s unhappy apprentice year in Paris, its radiant people emerging from a dark ground below cupolas and spires are a patriotic answer to the Mediterranean arcadias painted the previous year by Cézanne (“Large Bathers”), Matisse (“The Joy of Life”) and Derain (“The Golden Age”). This sparkling work of primitive ornamentation establishes Kandinsky as a Russian mystic; the context of the Pompidou, French modernist haven, dramatises the contrast with Ecole de Paris formalism and sensuality.

Retreating to Bavaria, Kandinsky and his German partner Gabriele Munter discovered the village of Murnau: “very very beautiful ... the dusky, dark-violet woods, the gleaming white buildings, velvety-deep roofs of the churches, saturated green ... foliage”. Its mountains, valleys, broad skies and toytown houses dissolving first into a patchwork of yellows, lemon-greens, azure-sapphires, as in “Murnau – View with Railway and Castle”, then into cascades of luminous, abstract colour – “Improvisation 7 (Storm)”, “Improvisation 9” – Murnau became one of modern art’s iconic sites.

German expressionism, and Jugendstil’s linearity and romantic undercurrent, all fed into Kandinsky’s experiments, crystallising in his work for the “Blaue Reiter” (Blue Rider) group which he founded in 1911. Blue was Kandinsky’s “heavenly colour”; riders, his favourite motif, derived from icons and denoted spiritual liberation, often evoking St George, Russia’s patron saint. A near-abstracted Horseman of the Apocalypse streaks furiously across a pared-down landscape in “Lyrical” (1911); a dynamic horseman outlined in white, lance shooting across the centre of the canvas, holds together the abstract composition “Painting with White Border” (1913); as late as 1924 the geometric abstract Bauhaus work “Backward Glance” includes a line tracing the back of a bounding horse.

Abstraction, as this range makes clear, was never an end in itself for Kandinsky; it was, as for his contemporary Malevich, expression of a particularly Russian spiritual vision. Nevertheless, when war broke out in 1914 and Kandinsky, an enemy alien, was given 24 hours to leave Germany, he returned to Moscow, he said, as “a foreigner”. Too shocked to paint, he spent years elucidating ideas in delicate, limpid drawings and watercolours which he called “filigree work ... akin to goldsmithery”.

Yet Moscow exerted its pull: “I would like to do a big Moscow landscape – gathering the parts from everywhere and unite them ... weak and strong elements, everything mixed together, just as the world itself.” “Moscow 1” (1916), its modern towers and ancient domes reeling through the blue diagonal planes – the influence of Malevich’s suprematism – of sky and earth, is his masterpiece of these years. Boris Pasternak described pre-revolutionary Russia as “a wild whirlpool into which all values were sucked ... a ceaselessly exploding firework whose flying particles had to be deciphered time and time again.” “Moscow 1” illustrates that thrilled instability.

Although he lost his entire fortune, Kandinsky embraced the revolution; in 1917 he abandoned Munter, married a Russian, Nina Andreevskaya, and threw himself into running Bolshevik cultural institutes and writing theoretical texts. Hardship, famine, the death of his baby son followed; Kandinsky painted little – materials were scarce – and when he did the results were solemn and dense, as in the abstract forms in “V Serom (in grey)” and “Black Spot”. He read the signs of artistic intolerance early and in 1921 fled back to Germany, where he became a Bauhaus leader. Another exile, to Paris, followed in 1937.

Most Russian artists flailed in exile. Kandinsky’s later work is often dry, schematic; this show includes the few great exceptions: hallucinatory spheres floating weightlessly in “Some Circles”, dancing triangles and circles in rose, violet, peach, gracefully balanced in “On Points”; most poignantly “Development in Brown”, a series of receding dark planes opening on a window of dazzling triangles. Painted the year the Nazis came to power, it is politically ominous but resolutely asserts Kandinsky’s lifelong belief in an inner spiritual reality. “In the middle,” wrote the French art critic Christian Zervos, “an aperture as clear as hope, which endows this painting with an extraordinary power, while making us dream of the infinite that our life limits from all sides.”

‘Kandinsky’, Centre Pompidou, Paris, to August 10; www.centrepompidou.fr, and at the Guggenheim, New York September 18-January 13 2010, www.guggenheim.org