White - Soft and Hard

Kandinsky finished this in Dessau in March 1932, in the last months the Bauhaus existed there. He had taught at the school for ten years and lived in one of the masters' houses beside it. That August the Dessau council, by then controlled by the Nazi party, voted to shut the Bauhaus down. It closed at the end of September, and in October Mies van der Rohe restarted it in Berlin as a private school, in an empty telephone factory in Steglitz. The painting left Germany in 1933, the same year Kandinsky did. He consigned it to Galka Scheyer in Los Angeles, who had been selling the Blue Four, Kandinsky with Klee, Feininger and Jawlensky, to Californian collectors since 1924, and by February 1936 a Los Angeles collector, Ruth Maitland, had bought it. The title is doing plain descriptive work: the white forms laid over the dark ground are partly cut with straight edges and partly curved.