Lightweight

By 1930 Kandinsky was teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau, the school that trained artists to think like designers of the machine age. That thinking reached his own materials. Conservators have found that in these years he began mixing ordinary Ripolin, a glossy commercial enamel sold for painting doors and radiators, into his pictures, and he noted it in his own handlists as 'oil plus rip'. The hard, even sheen of that house paint suits the geometry here, the floating circles and precise bars that had replaced the storms of colour of his earlier abstraction. Two years later political pressure forced the Bauhaus out of Dessau, and Kandinsky left Germany for Paris, where this canvas now hangs.