Acentric

Kandinsky dated this small sheet December 1924, and that month the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he taught, was being pushed out of the city. Right-wing nationalists had won the Thuringian state election in February, and by autumn the new government had cut the school's funding in half. On 26 December the masters announced that they would close the Bauhaus at the end of March. The work is gouache and watercolour on cardboard, less than 40 centimetres tall. Kandinsky gave it a German title, Azentrales, which means something without a centre, and circles, bars and bundles of fine lines are spread across a dark ground. In the spring of 1925 the town of Dessau took the school in, and Kandinsky moved there with it. The sheet belongs to the Prado and has been on long-term loan to the Reina Sofía since 2017.