Wassily Kandinsky, 1866-1944

Sotheby's New York, 19th & 20th Century, Old Master and Contemporary Prints, 4 May 1983, lot 243
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

New Rochelle, Castle Gallery, College of New Rochelle, Russian Avant-garde Art from the Schreiber Collection, September-October, 1984, no. 9
Storrs, The William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Russian Avant-garde Art from the Schreiber Collection, January-March, 1986
New Rochelle, Castle Gallery, College of New Rochelle, Champions of Modernism: Art of Tomorrow/Art of Today, February-March, 1996

Jennifer Roth, Russian Avant-garde Art from the Schreiber Collection, New York, 1984, illustrated
Vivien Raynor, "Art: Russian and American Shows at the Benton," New York Times, 2 March 1986
Leonard Hutton Galleries, The Blue Four, New York, 1984, p. 62, another example illustrated

The sheet is slightly buckled about edges. It is also very slightly yellowed and a little dirty, and there are extremely minor stains in some places. There are light crease marks near the lower left corner. Held in a modern wood frame and under glass. Unexamined out of frame.
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Kandinsky's move to the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922 marked a shift both in his theoretical writings and style, whereby a more objective idiom influenced by Suprematism and Constructivism replaced the expressionistic elements of his pre-war work. If colour was emphasised over form in the artist's early Munich period, the reverse was now true. The formal arrangement of this lithograph seems to be inspired by a landscape, although it takes place in an undefined, infinite space reminiscent of the work of Kasimir Malevich. The pictorial vocabulary is reduced to a relatively small number of geometric elements; the large circle which forms a focal point to balance the linear composition is a motif which gradually became more prominent in his work of the early 1920s and clearly fascinated him. As he wrote in a letter to his biographer, the circle 'is a link with the cosmic... the most modest form, simultaneously stable and unstable, loud and soft. Of the three primary forms [triangle, circle, square], it points most clearly to the fourth dimension".