Decisive Rose

Kandinsky painted this in March 1932. He had been teaching at the Bauhaus for ten years, and that August the Dessau city council, by then with a Nazi majority, voted the school shut. It reopened in Berlin in a disused telephone factory, lasted a few months and closed for good in 1933, after which Kandinsky left Germany for Paris and stayed there. Two years before any of that, in 1930, Solomon Guggenheim came to Dessau with his adviser Hilla Rebay, went up to Kandinsky's studio and started buying. This canvas ended up in the collection those visits began and carries a Guggenheim founding-collection number. It is 81 by 100 centimetres, and the rose of the title is Rosa in German, a colour rather than a flower.