Капризное

In 1930 the school Kandinsky taught at was already under political attack. That January Wilhelm Frick took office in the state of Thuringia, the first Nazi to hold a ministry in Germany, and the architect he installed to run the art school in Weimar had Oskar Schlemmer's murals in the old Bauhaus building destroyed. Kandinsky had left Weimar years earlier and was teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he painted this. It is a small thing, 56 centimetres across, done in oil on cardboard rather than canvas, and it carries the tight geometric language of his teaching years. The museum in Rotterdam catalogues it under its German title, Launisch, and has owned it since 1964.