Léger dans le lourd

Kandinsky painted this at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he had taught since 1922. His course there had students take an object apart into lines and tensions and nothing else, and in 1926 he had published the book behind it, Point and Line to Plane, which set out what each mark does on a surface. By 1929 the school was run by the architect Hannes Meyer, who wanted it designing for factories, and abstract painting sat awkwardly in that programme. The title is an impossible instruction, light inside heavy, the kind of problem Kandinsky liked setting himself. It belongs to what he called his cool period, which he once described as ice with a flame burning in it. The picture is oil on cardboard rather than canvas, a square 49.5 centimetres each way, and Rotterdam bought it in 1964.