Quiet Harmony

Kandinsky painted this on cardboard in 1924, the year the Bauhaus lost Weimar. A new right-wing majority in the Thuringian parliament halved the school's money and served notice on its masters from the following spring, and in December the Bauhaus voted to dissolve itself rather than accept the terms. It reopened in Dessau the next year. Kandinsky had been teaching there since 1922, and his painting had gone geometric by then, circles and straight edges and floating segments, the vocabulary he was setting down in the book published as Point and Line to Plane. In March of that same year he joined Klee, Feininger and Jawlensky in a group called the Blue Four, put together by their agent Galka Scheyer to show and sell them in the United States.