This genre-defying painter didn't pick up a brush until he was thirty years old. He was an academic with a promising career that he threw away to explore the arts. He was a Russian, yet he spent more than half of his life on the road, and died in self-imposed exile in France. As an artist he is credited with history's first abstract painting, but it was his theories that had a profound and lasting impact on the way that people understand and value what art can achieve.