White Cross

Kandinsky painted this between January and June 1922. In December 1921 he had left Moscow, where the Constructivists around Aleksandr Rodchenko had rejected his programme at the art institute he had led, and moved to Berlin. In June 1922 he accepted the architect Walter Gropius's invitation to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar. The title picks out one small detail. At the upper right, a black checkerboard leaves a white cross in the gaps between its squares, and once you have found it, other crosses start to surface all over the picture. The Guggenheim, which owns the work, sees in its floating shapes an affinity with Kazimir Malevich, the Russian pioneer of geometric abstraction. On the left, two signs like an upturned numeral three hang from little arrows, and because they point different ways, the whole canvas seems to rotate.