Osterei

In 1926 Kandinsky was teaching in Dessau and had just published his book on point and line, a nearly technical grammar of circles, arcs and angles. This is that grammar at the size of a hand. He painted it on a piece of cardboard cut as an oval and called it Osterei, Easter egg, so the support does the describing: white crescents, a red disc, a small segmented wheel and a scatter of coloured dots on a dark brown ground worked up with a sandy texture. Nothing in the picture itself shows an egg. It reached Paris in 1981, among the works his widow Nina left to the Centre Pompidou, where it carries an inventory number beginning with that year.