Ein Zentrum

1922 was the year Kandinsky started over. He had spent the war and the revolution in Moscow, helping build art schools and museums for the new Soviet state, until the ground shifted under him and he left for Germany. That summer he joined the Bauhaus in Weimar as a teacher. You can feel the change in a painting like this. The loose, storm-like abstractions of his Munich years are giving way to something more measured, circles, straight lines and hard-edged shapes pulled toward the middle, the geometry the Bauhaus was built on. He was 55 and beginning a second career among people half his age.