Ausgedehnt

1926 was the year the Bauhaus moved into the building Walter Gropius had designed for it in Dessau. The opening that December ran over two days and drew more than 1,000 guests. Kandinsky was teaching there and turning 60, and that same year he published Point and Line to Plane, the ninth of the Bauhaus books, a treatise on what a single point does to a surface and what happens when it is drawn out into a line. This canvas sits inside that argument. It is unusually tall and narrow for him, 95 centimetres by 44, so the circles and ruled diagonals have to stack rather than spread out. The German title he gave it, Ausgedehnt, means stretched or extended.