Rays

In 1926 Kandinsky published a short book called Point and Line to Plane, an attempt to set down the grammar of his own marks. What a point does. What a line does. What happens to either when it meets a flat surface. He was teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau at the time, the school having moved there from Weimar the year before into a new building by its director, Walter Gropius. He painted this canvas the following year, and its German title, Strahlenlinien, means lines of rays. He stayed with the Bauhaus through its last move to Berlin and its closure in 1933, then left Germany for Paris that December. The painting went to Rotterdam in 1964, when the museum bought it.