Points

Kandinsky painted this in Moscow in 1920, and the city around him was not a comfortable place to be a painter. He had come back to Russia in 1914, watched the revolution arrive, and by 1920 was sitting on committees and helping found the Institute of Artistic Culture, an official body meant to decide what art now was. The younger Constructivists around him wanted hard edges, measurement, the machine. His answer, on this canvas, is a scatter of small forms and points held in tension across the surface. For him a point was the first and smallest element of painting, the seed everything else grows from, an idea he would soon be teaching in Germany. Within a year he had left Moscow for the Bauhaus and did not come back. The picture travelled even further. Today it hangs in Kurashiki, a small city in western Japan, at the Ohara Museum of Art, the first museum in the country devoted to Western painting.