Tache noire

Kandinsky painted this in Moscow in 1921, and within months he had packed up and left Russia for good. He had come home full of hope after the revolution, helping to organise new museums and teaching institutes, but the mood was turning against him. The younger Constructivists wanted art to serve the factory and the state, and had little patience for his idea of painting as a kind of visible music, forms and colours sounding together like an orchestra. The black shape that gives the picture its name pulls against the drifting reds, blues and yellows around it. By the following year he was in Germany, teaching at the new Bauhaus.