Frio

By 1929 Kandinsky had been teaching at the Bauhaus for seven years, the last four of them in Dessau. Gropius had resigned the year before and the school was now run by the architect Hannes Meyer, who put building work well ahead of painting. Kandinsky carried on with his own, mostly small and mostly on cardboard, this one barely 49 centimetres square. The title comes out of the vocabulary he taught with. He treated colour as something that has a temperature, blue as a colour that retreats and cools, yellow as one that advances and warms. The curators in Paris read the candlestick, the balloon and the tree that surface among the geometry as a trace of his friendship with Paul Klee, who taught along the same corridor. His widow Nina left the picture to France in 1981.