Due ovali

Kandinsky painted Two Ovals in 1919, in a Moscow turned upside down. The war had caught him in Germany in 1914 and sent him home to Russia. Now the revolution had come, the civil war was raging, and Kandinsky, who had helped invent abstract painting, found himself a Soviet cultural official, setting up museums and teaching programmes for the new state. The canvas is nearly pure abstraction, two pale oval fields floating in a darker ground, crossed by lines and small shapes that seem to drift and collide. You can still half-read a space in it, something opening behind the forms, though nothing in it names a real object. Within two years he would leave Russia for good, carrying these floating geometries with him to teach at the Bauhaus in Germany.