Untitled

By 1930 Kandinsky was teaching at the Bauhaus, the German design school then in Dessau, and his abstraction had changed shape. The loose, floating patches of colour he had painted around 1913 had hardened into exact geometry: circles, straight lines and sharp angles, set down with a designer's precision. This small wood engraving comes out of that phase. Cut in black and white, it is built from the same clipped, measured forms he was then teaching his students to treat as a language of their own.