柔らかな圧力

In the local elections of October 1931 the Nazis took control of Dessau, the industrial town in central Germany where the Bauhaus had settled, after campaigning against the school as Bolshevik, foreign and un-German. Within a year the city council voted to close it. Kandinsky taught there through all of it. He was 65, a Russian who had already left one country after a revolution, and he went on painting in the middle of the argument. This one is oil on plywood, a square just under a metre each way, which suits a school where the painting studios sat next to the joinery workshops. Its German title, Weicher Druck, gives soft pressure, and it comes from the years when Kandinsky was teaching a whole grammar of point, line and plane. The Bauhaus moved to Berlin in 1932 and shut for good in July 1933. He left for Paris that December.