Akzent in Rosa

By 1926 Kandinsky was teaching at the Bauhaus, newly moved into its famous glass-and-concrete building at Dessau, and that same year he published his theory book on how points and lines build a picture. You can feel the theory here. A golden diamond floats on a deep blue-violet ground, hung with discs and small squares arranged with a designer's care. He made it partly with an airbrush, a tool then new to the Bauhaus workshops, which let him lay down soft graded halos of colour that give the flat shapes a sense of hanging in space. The pink disc that gives the picture its name sits off to one side, ringed in red.