Pannello per Edwin R. Campbell n. 2

In 1914 a Chicago lawyer named Arthur Jerome Eddy, among the first Americans to buy modern European painting, put a client in touch with Kandinsky in Munich. The client was Edwin R. Campbell, who had recently helped found the Chevrolet Motor Company, and what he wanted was decoration for the round entrance hall of his apartment on Park Avenue in New York.

Kandinsky painted four tall panels for it. Then the war closed the Atlantic. He left Germany for Russia within weeks, and the panels sat unseen until they were shown in Stockholm in February 1916, shipped over that summer, and hung in Campbell's foyer in the autumn, with the painter by then in Moscow and no way of getting to New York.

This one worked its way through the New York trade and into the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1941, which passed it to the Museum of Modern Art in 1983.