Vide vert

Kandinsky painted this in 1930, while teaching at the Bauhaus, the design school then housed in Dessau in Germany. By this point the loose, stormy abstractions of his early years had given way to something measured and quiet, circles and straight lines and floating geometric shapes set against broad fields of flat colour, the same visual grammar he was drilling into his students in the classroom. The green of the title is the field those shapes drift in. He had a whole theory behind it, worked out in his writing, about how colour and form act on us almost like sound. The school around him had only a few years left. Under mounting political pressure the Bauhaus would be pushed out of Dessau and finally shut in 1933, and Kandinsky left Germany for Paris.