To Nina for Christmas

Turn this small board over and there is a dedication in Russian, in Kandinsky's hand, to his little Ninusya, dated Christmas Eve 1926, Dessau. Nina was his wife. They had married in Moscow in 1917, and by 1926 they were living in Dessau, the German town where the Bauhaus had moved and where Kandinsky taught. The picture was a private present, yet the back also carries the number 364 in ink, its place in the numbered list Kandinsky kept of his paintings, along with the year and its approximate size. On the front, lower left, are his monogram and the date, 26. Nina kept the picture through their move to France in 1933 and for decades after his death in 1944. It entered the Centre Pompidou in 1981, as part of her bequest.