White Line

By 1920 Kandinsky was in Moscow, a few years after the Revolution, sitting on committees for the new Soviet state and helping set up its art schools and museums. The younger Constructivists around him wanted art put to work, designs for factories and posters, nothing so private as this. He painted mostly against that current. Across the canvas a single white line sweeps through a crowd of floating shapes and hot reds and greens, never touching them, holding its own clear note above the noise. Within a year the arguments wore him down, and in 1921 he left Russia for good to teach at the new Bauhaus in Germany.