Unequal

In July 1933 this canvas left Germany for California. Kandinsky sent it to Galka Scheyer, a German-born painter and art agent who had spent nearly a decade promoting him in America as one of the Blue Four, the group she had formed around him, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Alexej von Jawlensky. That October it hung in her Blue Four exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum, two months before Kandinsky himself left Germany for Paris. Visitors saw a column of floating rectangles on the left, a glowing blue disc ringed in yellow on the right, and thin strokes of sky blue with black showing through beneath. Scheyer bought the picture outright in the 1940s. After her death in 1945 it went missing from her estate and was sold at a 1948 benefit auction in Beverly Hills. In 1972 the Pasadena museum that had received the rest of her collection bought it and hung it with the others again.