Four Parts

On 22 August 1932, at the urging of the Nazi Party, the town council of Dessau voted to close the Bauhaus, the art and design school it had hosted since 1925. Kandinsky had taught at the Bauhaus since 1922. The school moved to Berlin as a private institute and was forced to shut for good the following year. This small gouache on paper, later mounted on board, was made in 1932. Thin ruled lines divide it into four horizontal bands, and each band holds its own scatter of small signs: crescents, dots, a circle crossed like a window, a little ladder of lines. One long, pale curve ignores the divisions and runs down through the top three bands. Kandinsky's monogram sits in the lower left corner. The Metropolitan Museum received the sheet as a gift in 1991.