Three Elements

Kandinsky painted this in March 1925, a turning point year for the Bauhaus, the German art school where he taught. That spring a hostile regional government forced the school out of Weimar, and it began packing up to move to Dessau. In his classroom Kandinsky drilled students in the basic vocabulary of form, and it shows here: a yellow triangle and a dark blue circle riding on a large brown mass, with lines cutting across like a diagram come to life. He kept the picture close. He gave it to his nephew, a young man named Alexandre Kojève who would grow into one of the century's more influential philosophers, and it stayed in that family for decades.