Yellow Accompaniment

Kandinsky painted this in February and March of 1924, while the school he taught at was being squeezed out of its own town. The Bauhaus was in Weimar then, and the state government elected in Thuringia that February disliked it and halved its funding. Within a year the school had packed up and moved to Dessau. In those same weeks Kandinsky joined three colleagues, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Alexei Jawlensky, in a group they called the Blue Four, put together by the dealer Galka Scheyer for one purpose, to exhibit and sell the four of them in America. That plan is a large part of why so much of their work crossed the Atlantic. This canvas went into the founding collection of Solomon Guggenheim in New York, who began buying Kandinsky at the end of the 1920s on the advice of a painter, Hilla Rebay.