Intimate Message

1925 is the year the Bauhaus reopened in the industrial town of Dessau, after a new right-leaning government in Thuringia had cut its funding and forced it out of Weimar. Kandinsky moved with the school, and his painting moved too, toward the cool, deliberate geometry of his Dessau years: circles, straight edges, small forms weighed against one another on a quiet ground. This is a modest thing, oil on cardboard barely larger than a sheet of paper, and its title turns inward rather than out. It reached the Paris museum from the artist's widow, Nina Kandinsky, and hangs today at the Centre Pompidou.