Sign

1925 was the year the Bauhaus lost Weimar. The regional government halved its money and offered the teachers six-month contracts, so the masters closed the school themselves, and by the summer it was starting again in Dessau, an industrial town on the Elbe, in rented rooms while the new building went up. Kandinsky, then 58, moved with it and went on running the wall-painting workshop. He was also finishing the book that came out the next year as Point and Line to Plane, an attempt to set down what a point, a line and a plane each do to the eye. Sign belongs to that stretch of work: bands of red, orange and yellow, black strokes crossing at the top, a red circle and a blue one below. He painted it on cardboard, about 69 by 49 centimetres, and his widow Nina kept it into the 1960s.