En gris

Kandinsky painted this in Moscow in 1919, and for once we can tie a picture to a turning point he named himself. He had spent the previous two years or so barely painting at all, short of money and busy with administrative work for the new Bolshevik government after the revolution. When he came back to the canvas, something had shifted. He called In Grey the conclusion of his 'dramatic' period, the end of years of piling form on swirling form. Here the shapes are still tumbling and abstract, greys and dark colours knotted together, but their edges are firmer, drifting towards the clean geometry that was coming. Within a few years he had left Russia for Germany and the Bauhaus, where the free storms of his earlier work would settle into circles, triangles and straight lines.