Swinging

By 1925 the Bauhaus, the German school of art and design where Kandinsky taught, had been forced out of Weimar by hostile local politicians and was rebuilding in the industrial town of Dessau. Kandinsky had spent years pushing painting toward pure abstraction, and in that clean, engineering-minded atmosphere his shapes grew crisp and geometric, circles, triangles and taut arcs set against flat colour. He gave this one the title Swinging, and the pointed curves swung across the right side are meant to carry that motion, like the arc of an arm. He was also writing and teaching colour theory in these years, so a painting like this doubles as a small demonstration of the ideas he set in front of his students each week.