Wassily Kandinsky

Galka E. Scheyer, Braunschweig, New York & California (acquired in July 1928; until 1945)
Nina Kandinsky, Paris (the artist's widow; until 1971)
Galerie Beyeler, Basel (acquired in 1971)
Andrée Stassart, Paris (acquired in 1972)
Galerie Berggruen, Paris (acquired in 1972)
Lefevre Gallery, London (acquired in 1973)
Baron Léon Lambert, Brussels (sale: Christie's, London, 30th June 1987, lot 309)
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Oakland, The Oakland Art Gallery, Kandinsky, 1929, no. 13
Hollywood, Braxton Gallery, Kandinsky, 1930, no. 24
San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, The Blue Four. Kandinsky and Feininger, 1931, no. 27
Oakland, The Oakland Art Gallery, The Blue Four: Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, 1931, no. 27
Paris, Galerie Maeght, Kandinsky: aquarelles et gouaches. Collection privée de Madame W. Kandinsky, 1957
Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Kandinsky, 1958, no. 82
Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, Aquarelles et gouaches de W. Kandinsky, 1959, no. 14
Pasadena, Pasadena Art Museum; San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Art; Portland, Art Museum; San Antonio, Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute; Colorado Springs, Fine Arts Center, Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art; Columbus, The Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts; St. Louis, Washington University Art Gallery; Montreal, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts & Worcester, Worcester Art Museum, Vasily Kandinsky: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1963, no. 17
New York, The Museum of Modern Art; Fort Worth, Fort Worth Art Center; Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Art; Ithaca, Cornell University, White Museum of Art; Louisville, J.B. Speed Art Museum; Manchester, New Haven, Currier Gallery of Art; Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario; Pasadena, Pasadena Art Museum; San Francisco , San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts;  Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Center; Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Arts & Bern, Kunstmuseum, Kandinsky Watercolors, 1969-71, no. 24 (no. 33 in Bern)
Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Kandinsky, Aquarelle und Zeichnungen, 1972, no. 38, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Vermischung)
Paris, Galerie Berggruen, Kandinsky: aquarelles & dessins, 1972, no. 29, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
London, The Lefevre Gallery, Oil Paintings and Watercolours by Wassily Kandinsky, 1973, no. 22, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Die Blaue Vier, 1998, no. 78

The artist’s handlist: ‘Watercolours’: iv 1928, 248, In einander
Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolours, Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1994, vol. II, no. 836, illustrated  p. 191

Executed on cream wove paper, laid down on grey paper which is hinged to the mount at the top edge. The medium is fresh and unfaded and this work is in very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although slightly stronger in the original.
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Ineinander, executed in April 1928, is one of Kandinsky's most exquisite works produced in a period that saw an important development in both his artistic practice and theory. Throughout the early 1920s his work gradually moved away from the free-flowing irregular lines and shapes of his earlier years, towards a more geometric form of abstraction. By 1928 his watercolours and paintings are dominated by circles and triangles rather than the more organic forms of his earlier works. A definitive feature of the Dessau period was the overlapping of shapes and colours which reintroduced a sense of spatial depth which had been lacking from his earlier abstract compositions. Kandinsky’s radical mode of abstraction was used to convey sharply delineated states of mind in form and colour. Frank Whitford suggests that Kandinsky’s titles outlined a singular sensory experience: 'The titles of these works - for example Vibration, Circling and the marvellous Floating - provide an indication of what he wished such compositions to convey' (F. Whitford, Kandinsky: Watercolours and other Works on Paper (exhibition catalogue), The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1999, p. 69).

The strikingly vivid palette employed in the present work illustrates the artist's highly tuned sense of colour and its application. Kandinsky's response to colour was heightened by a synesthetic combination of sights and sounds. In his first major theoretical text, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky wrote with intense precision about the various meanings and emotions captured by colours: 'In its middle tones such as vermilion, red has more of the constancy of a powerful emotion: it is like a steadily burning passion, a self-confident power that cannot easily be subdued, but can be extinguished by blue, as a red-hot iron by water [...]. Vermilion has a sound like a tuba, and a parallel can be drawn with the sound of a loud drum beat' (quoted in Frank Whitford, op. cit., 1999, p. 24).

During the Bauhaus years Kandinsky further developed his theories about the spiritual aspect of art, and his ideas found a fresh expression in the paintings and watercolours of the period (figs. 1-3). In 1926 Kandinsky published his book Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane), which outlined his theories of the basic elements of artistic composition, evident in the dynamic contrast of the dense bordering squares and rectangles and the energetic forms of the  present composition. Most notably, he developed his Theory of Correspondences, which emphasised a systematic study of pictorial elements, both in combining the forms of triangle and circle, considered by the artist to be 'the two primary, most strongly contrasting plane figures' (W. Kandinsky quoted in Kandinsky, Bauhaus and Russian Years (exhibition catalogue), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1983, p. 52). In the present work the dynamic relationship between the triangle, symbolising stability and ascension, and the circular form, representing freedom from gravity, is accentuated by the intersection of fused colours.

Ineinander was first owned by Galka E. Scheyer, an artist and art dealer who in March 1924 had helped to establish the Blue Four. This group consisted of  Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Kandinsky - all professors teaching at the Bauhaus - and Alexej von Jawlensky who had pursued a more independent career after his close association with Der Blaue Reiter in Murnau. The Blue Four was formed by Scheyer to promote German Modernism amongst American collectors, many of whom were considerably wealthier than their European counterparts, in the hope that they might provide a much needed boost to their finances. She set about organising a series of exhibitions that travelled throughout the United States and Mexico, including the ground-breaking tour of 1931 in which the present work was included. Scheyer settled in California in 1933 until her death in 1945 when she bequeathed the vast majority of her collection to the University of California, Los Angeles; after nearly a decade it was finally placed in the hands of the Pasadena Art Institute, now the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.