단계

Kandinsky painted Levels in 1929, well into his years teaching at the Bauhaus, the German design school then based in Dessau. His work had turned crisp and geometric by then, circles, triangles and little horn-like forms laid out across the canvas almost like objects set in a display case. That same year an American mining heir, Solomon Guggenheim, began buying Kandinsky's paintings on the advice of the artist Hilla Rebay, and met the painter at Dessau soon after. The pictures they gathered became the core of the museum Guggenheim opened in New York, where this canvas now hangs. Four years after it was made, the Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close for good.