Colored Sticks

On 4 April 1928 the curtain went up at the Friedrich Theater in Dessau on Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, staged by Kandinsky. For most of it there were no performers on stage at all. Cut-out shapes moved across it and the lighting shifted with the score, following pages of instructions he had written out beforehand. He was teaching at the Bauhaus in the same town, and 1928 was also the year he took German citizenship, seven years after leaving Russia for good. This tempera on cardboard, barely 43 centimetres tall, belongs to that year, one of the several hundred small works on paper and card he made during the Bauhaus period. Of the production itself, 17 watercolours and drawings survive, along with the piano score that belonged to his assistant on it, Felix Klee, the son of Paul Klee.