His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, surrealism and orientalism. He was a natural draughtsman who experimented with, and eventually got deeply into, colour theory, writing about it extensively. His written collections of lectures, Writings on Form and Design Theory, are considered as important to modern art as Leonardo da Vinci’s written works were to the Renaissance.

His artistic breakthrough came in 1914 when he briefly visited Tunisia and was impressed by the quality of light. His painting was then interrupted by WWI, but from 1921 to 1931 he, along with Kandinsky, taught at the German Bauhaus School.