Oito vezes

By 1929 Kandinsky had been teaching for years at the Bauhaus, the German school of art and design, then housed in its new glass-and-concrete building in Dessau. His painting had cooled from the storms of colour he made before the First World War into something quieter and geometric, circles and grids and floating signs laid out like a plan. The title simply counts a shape that recurs across the surface. He was in his early sixties, working here in oil on a modest scale. It is one of 11 of his Bauhaus paintings that later came together in the museum at Nantes.