Brunâtre

In the spring of 1931 Kandinsky took on the oddest commission of his career. The German Building Exhibition in Berlin wanted a model music room, and on the recommendation of his Bauhaus director Mies van der Rohe he designed one, covering its walls with large ceramic panels fired by a workshop in Oranienburg outside the city. The room sat in the section on building materials, between the furniture and the marble, and it came down in July when the show closed. This picture belongs to the same year and works at the opposite scale, oil on a sheet of cardboard about 70 centimetres across. He had taken to naming canvases after whatever colour held them together, and brown does the holding here. It reached San Francisco in 1945, a gift from William Gerstle, the patron who in 1931 had paid for Diego Rivera to paint a fresco at the city's art school.