Líneas negras

By December 1913, when Kandinsky finished this in Munich, he had spent years arguing that a painting could work like music, that colour and line could move a viewer without showing them anything they could name. Black Lines is one of his first paintings to really let go. There is no landscape hidden in it and no figures to decode. Patches of red, pink and green float and press against one another, and over them runs a scaffolding of thin black strokes, taut and nervous like handwriting. It looks weightless, almost cheerful. Within a year the war would push Kandinsky, a Russian citizen, out of Germany and back to Moscow, breaking up the circle of artists he had gathered around him. Solomon Guggenheim bought the canvas some two decades later, among his earliest purchases of the new abstract art.