Wassily Kandinsky

Nina Kandinsky, Paris
Erica Varay (a gift from the above on 31st October 1956)

Berlin, Galerie Alfred Flechtheim, Kandinsky, 1931, no. 11
Chicago, Art Institute, Twelfth International Exhibition of Watercolors, 1932, no. 168
Basel, Kunsthalle, Gedächtnisausstellung Wassily Kandinsky, 1945, no. 4
Lucerne, Galerie Rosengart, Kandinsky Exhibition: Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings, 1953, no. 7

Artist's handlist, Watercolours, listed as 'iv 1929, 344, Linie'
Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolours, Catalogue Raisonné, 1922-1944, vol. II, no. 935, illustrated in colour p. 195

Executed on cream wove paper, laid down on board. The extreme upper and right edges are deckled. There are three tiny airbubbles towards the centre of the left edge, due to the laying down process and only visible under a raking light. There are two minor vertical creases to the sheet, one on the upper edge and the other on the lower edge, both due to the laying down process. There is a tiny spot of discolouration towards the upper left corner. Otherwise, this work is in overall good condition.
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Composed of arcs, triangles and straight lines, Linie is a beautiful example of Kandinsky's watercolours of the late 1920s. This decade saw the artist's work move away from the more free flowing and irregular forms of his earlier work, towards a cleaner, more refined aesthetic.  In 1925, following his return from Moscow to Germany after World War I, Kandinsky started teaching at the Bauhaus school in Dessau, where he shared a house with that other master of Modernism, Paul Klee.

Kandinsky's teachings and writings of that time draw from Russian constructivist art and were enormously influential in relation to the development of abstract art internationally. He believed that particular arrangements of shapes triggered an 'inner resonance' or 'spiritual vibration', and could elicit from the viewer a powerful emotional response. Jagged solid forms, arcs, grids, triangles and circles, whether overlapping or adjacent, were strictly non-representational and created only to celebrate the beauty of form for form's sake.

In Linie, a playful dynamism is created by the central curved line slowly thinning out towards the right.  One feels as if the artist executed it with a single quick and determined stroke of his paintbrush, before turning his attention to the remaining, more measured geometric shapes. The result is a wonderfully subtle exercise in lyricism.