Jocular Sounds

In 1929 Kandinsky was teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau, and much of what he painted there was small, like this board, not quite 50 centimetres wide. Its German title is Scherzklänge, jocular sounds, and the forms are few and light on an off-white ground. A grey disc, two chevrons, a scatter of coloured rectangles and a spindly frame of thin lines. The years around it were less playful. By December 1933 the board belonged to Ida Bienert, a Dresden collector whose house had welcomed Kandinsky, Klee and other Bauhaus teachers. That same month Kandinsky left Germany for Paris. The picture then passed through a Berlin gallery and dealers in Paris and New York before Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum bought it in 1956. His red initials and the year, K 29, are still there in the lower left corner.