Tempted to quit the rat race and unleash your inner artist? It worked for Vasily Kandinsky, the subject of a blockbuster exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW from Saturday.

Kandinsky was a lawyer, economist and ethnographer before throwing it all off to become an artist at the age of about 30. By his death in 1944, he was so hot that American tycoon Solomon R. Guggenheim began collecting his work in bulk.