Dans l'ovale clair

In 1925 the Bauhaus was forced out of Weimar. A nationalist local government had cut its funding, so the school packed up and reopened in the industrial town of Dessau. Kandinsky, who taught there, painted this that same year, on cardboard rather than canvas. By now he had left behind the loose, exploding colour of his Munich years for circles, triangles and taut straight lines floating inside a glowing oval. It was also the year he finished his book Point and Line to Plane, which argued that a shape and a colour carry feeling on their own, with nothing to depict. He gave the picture the number 313 in the handwritten list he kept of every finished work.