Rosa con gris

1924 was the year the ground moved under the Bauhaus. Elections in Thuringia that February handed the state parliament to the right, the new government cut the school's funding and served notice on its teachers, and in December the staff voted to close the Weimar Bauhaus rather than accept the terms. Kandinsky was one of those teachers, running the wall-painting workshop, and this is the sort of thing he was making while it went on. He kept a numbered handlist of his own work, and on the back of this one he wrote, in his own hand, No 277, 1924, Rosa mit Grau. It is painted on pulpboard, a pressed card, rather than on canvas. The school reopened the following year in Dessau, in a new building of its own.