Composition VIII

By 1923, Kandinsky had spent the war and revolution years back in Russia, teaching and absorbing the hard-edged geometric art then flourishing in Moscow. He returned to Germany and joined the Bauhaus, the new school of art and design in Weimar, and his painting changed. Set this beside the stormy, near-erupting Compositions he had made a decade earlier. Here everything is cool and measured: circles, sharp triangles, taut lines and grids floating on a pale ground. The big dark circle ringed with a halo of colour in the upper left anchors the whole arrangement. Kandinsky believed such shapes and colours worked on us directly, like music, and at the Bauhaus he set about teaching that as a system.