Vers le haut

By 1929 the painter who had helped invent abstraction two decades earlier was teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau, and his wild early color had cooled into ruled lines, circles and neat triangles. This small panel, painted that October, stacks those shapes into a single figure that seems to lift off the ground. Its German title, 'Empor,' simply means upward, and if you look at the base of the form and the upper right you can find the letter E tucked into the geometry, a quiet echo of the word. Down the corridor at Dessau worked his friend Paul Klee, and something of Klee's playful precision has rubbed off here. Within four years the Nazis would force the school to close and Kandinsky would leave Germany for good.