Herunter 476

Kandinsky painted this square of oil on cardboard in November 1929, while he was teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau, the German art and design school the Nazis would close in 1933. He kept a handwritten list of everything he made, and the 476 in the title is simply this picture's place on that list. Herunter is German for downward, and the six tall rectangles ranged across the pale blue-green ground step down from left to right like a flight of stairs. It reached Nantes in 1958 as a gift from Gildas Fardel, a local collector of abstract art, and it was the first Kandinsky to enter a public collection in the French provinces. Since 1987 it has hung with ten more works from his Bauhaus years, lent by the national modern art museum in Paris.