On White II

Kandinsky painted On White II early in 1923, teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar, the German school then trying to fuse art with design and industry. He had left Russia two years earlier, and something of the Moscow avant-garde came with him. The flat coloured planes and the hard geometry here echo Malevich and the Suprematists. Lines, circles, triangles and a checkerboard scatter across a white field that Kandinsky treated as silence, a nothing out of which form can appear. At the centre sits a jagged black shape, which he thought of as Saint George and his lance, an old Russian emblem of victory folded into the abstraction. He liked the painting enough to hang it in his own dining room when the Bauhaus moved to Dessau.