Ovale rouge

Kandinsky painted this in Moscow in 1920, and the year matters. He had come back to Russia at the start of the First World War, and after the revolution he threw himself into the new Soviet art world, running museums and teaching. But the avant-garde around him was turning hard toward geometry and use, and his floating, musical shapes were slipping out of official favour. Red Oval balances a red egg-shape against a yellow field and a black bar, forms that seem to drift rather than build. Within a year he had left for Germany and the Bauhaus, and he never lived in Russia again.