Free

From 1926 Kandinsky lived in one half of a white semi-detached house in Dessau and Paul Klee lived in the other, each with a studio of the same dimensions. The Bauhaus had just moved into its new building a short walk away, and in 1927 the two of them started a painting course inside a school otherwise given over to lamps, chairs, weaving and typography. Students brought their own canvases and the work was talked through in terms of colour, rhythm and tension. Within a year it had a name, the free painting class, and it drew students who wanted to paint at a school that did not officially teach painting. This picture is from that same year in Dessau, oil on cardboard, half a metre high. Since 2015 it has been in Madrid, on long-term loan to the Reina Sofia from a private collection.