Development

In 1926 Kandinsky was teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau, and that year he published a book called Point and Line to Plane. In it he set out, almost like a scientist, the building blocks of any picture: the point, the line, and the flat plane they sit on. His painting had shifted to match. The stormy, half-buried forms of his pre-war years had given way to clean geometry, to circles, grids and floating bars weighed against one another. This small panel belongs to that measured phase of his work. 1926 was also the year he turned 60, marked by exhibitions across Germany. By then he treated abstraction as something with rules, a grammar you could set down on paper and teach in a classroom.