Inner Alliance

By 1929 Kandinsky had been teaching at the Bauhaus for seven years, first at Weimar and then Dessau, and his painting had cooled from the storms of colour he made before the war into something measured and diagrammatic. Three years earlier he had published a book, Point and Line to Plane, working out how the simplest marks behave on a surface. This small canvas puts that thinking to work. Circles, checkerboards, half-moons and fine straight lines are set against a dark ground and balanced against one another rather than describing anything. The Bauhaus was already under political pressure in Germany, and would be shut down four years later.