Schwarzer Raster

By 1922 Kandinsky had left Moscow for good. He'd spent the war years in Russia, where the new Soviet art schools pushed for geometry in the service of the factory, and his talk of spiritual abstraction found few takers. That winter he joined the Bauhaus in Weimar, and his painting changed with the address. The loose, storm-like colour of his Munich years gives way here to something measured: a black web of lines pulled taut across the canvas, with floating shapes and a few sharp diagonals held inside it. The grid that names the picture isn't quite regular, and the colours still drift free of it. He was 56 that year, teaching a workshop to students half his age.