Isolated Sounds

By 1927 the Bauhaus had been in Dessau for a year, installed in Gropius's new building of glass and steel, and the school's public language was industry, standardisation, the machine. Kandinsky was teaching there. He gave this painting, barely 40 centimetres across and made on cardboard rather than canvas, the title Einzelne Klange, isolated sounds.

Sound had been in his titles for years. The book of woodcuts and prose poems he published in Munich in 1912 was called Klange, and he had been writing about colours as instruments, yellow as a trumpet, long before Dessau.

On the back he inked his own running number for the work, 391, together with the title and the measurements, the way he recorded every picture he made. His widow Nina left it to the Paris museum in 1981.