Zarte Spannung

Kandinsky made this in 1923, a couple of years after leaving revolutionary Russia for good and joining the teaching staff of the Bauhaus in Weimar. Germany that year was in the grip of runaway inflation, money losing its worth by the hour, yet his own work was moving the opposite way, toward exactness and quiet control. This is one of a run of small watercolours he numbered by hand. Circles, triangles and thin straight lines hang in the space as if weighed against one another, held in the balance the title names. He had spent years arguing that colour and shape could carry feeling on their own, the way music does, with no recognisable object at all. Here that argument is pared down to a few clean geometric signs floating on the page.