Gentle Event

By 1928 Kandinsky had been teaching at the Bauhaus, the German school of art and design, for six years, and his painting had changed with it. The loose storms of colour of his early years had given way to circles, grids, and floating geometric shapes arranged with almost architectural care. This small piece, painted on cardboard, carries the German title Milder Vorgang, a gentle event. Nothing dramatic happens in it. Forms drift and meet and hold a quiet balance, the kind of unshowy incident the title points to. Kandinsky always insisted that abstract shapes and colours work on us the way music does. Five years after he painted this, the Nazis closed the Bauhaus and he left Germany for good.