En bleu

By 1925 the Bauhaus, the design school where Kandinsky taught, had been pushed out of Weimar by hostile local politicians and was packing up to move to the town of Dessau. In that unsettled year he painted this. Earlier his shapes had been loose and stormy. Here they are precise: circles, checkerboards, and thin triangles that seem to hang weightless. Kandinsky had long argued that blue was the deepest, most inward colour, the one that pulls the eye toward the infinite, and he set nearly everything here against it. A small dark semicircle near the centre, ringed like a target, is the kind of tuned shape he believed could sound in the mind the way a note sounds in the ear.