Grey Oval

1917 was a year in which Kandinsky finished only a handful of paintings. He had come back to Moscow in 1914, when the war made Germany impossible for a Russian, and he was still adjusting to a city he had left as a young man. In February he married Nina Andreevskaya. Weeks later the Tsar abdicated, and by the autumn the Bolsheviks were in power and the Moscow buildings he had inherited were nationalised, taking with them the rent he had lived on. This canvas belongs to that year. The floating, weightless forms come out of his Munich work from before the war, gathered here around one grey oval, with the colour cooled down. By 1918 he was inside the new state's art department, teaching and organising museums.