Trente

In 1937 the Nazi government staged a show in Munich called Degenerate Art, hanging modern works to be jeered at, and Kandinsky's paintings were among those pulled from German museums. He was 71 by then and living outside Paris, having left Germany in 1933 when the Bauhaus, where he taught, was shut down. That is the year he painted this. Thirty small cells, five across and six down, each holding its own black-and-white sign, a comb, a ladder, a grid, a swarm of little shapes. There is no color at all. After decades arguing that color carried emotion, he built this one out of pure black and white.