Tache rouge II

Kandinsky painted Red Spot II in 1921, his last full year in Moscow. He had gone back to Russia when the First World War broke out, lived through the Revolution, and spent years helping to reorganize Soviet museums and art schools. By 1921 that work had soured for him, and at the end of the year he left for Germany and never returned. On this large canvas the forms float free of anything you could name, a bright red mass set off center among sweeping bands of blue, yellow and white. Within a year he was teaching at the Bauhaus, where his floating shapes would tighten into the hard circles and grids of his German decade. Here they are still loose and weather-like.