Cuadro azul

Kandinsky dated this small canvas January 1924. He was teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar and the school had about a year left there. Thuringia had just voted in a government that wanted it gone, the budget was halved, and by the end of 1924 the masters had given notice and were looking for a city that would take them in.

That spring a German artist turned dealer, Galka Scheyer, put four of them together, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Alexej von Jawlensky, as the Blue Four, on the theory that Americans might buy work Germany was turning against. It kept pictures crossing the Atlantic for years, and this one ended up in New York.

He had a settled theory about the colour. In 1911 he had written that the deeper a blue goes, the more strongly it draws a person toward the infinite, and he meant it as a working rule for painters.