Wassily Kandinsky

Galerie René Drouin, Paris

Private Collection, Paris (acquired by 1970)

Galerie Bargera, Cologne

Private Collection, Düsseldorf (acquired from the above in the 1970s)

Thence by descent to the present owners 

Berlin, Galerie Alfred Flechtheim, Kandinsky, 1931, no. 70

Paris, Galerie Cahiers d’Art, Wassily Kandinsky, 1934

Zurich, Kunsthaus, Georges Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, 1946, no. 60

Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum & The Hague, Gemeente Museum, Kandinsky, 1947-48, no. 50

Lucerne, Galerie Rosengart, Kandinsky: Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings, 1953, no. 5

Paris, Galerie Maeght, Kandinsky: Bauhaus de Dessau, 1927-1933, 1965, no. 26 (catalogue published in Derrière le Miroir, no. 154, Paris, November 1965)

Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, Kandinsky Centenaire, 1966, no. 62 (as dating from 1929)

New York, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, Kandinsky, The Bauhaus Years, 1966, no. 34, illustrated in the catalogue

Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Wassily Kandinsky, 1970, no. 96, illustrated in the catalogue

Cologne, Galerie Bargera, Wassily Kandinsky. Gouachen, Aquarelle, Ölbilder und Zeichnungen, 1973, no. 31, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

The artist's handlist IV, no. 491

Will Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky, Life and Work, London, 1959, no. 342, illustrated p. 377 (as dating from 1929)

Hans K. Roethel & Jean K. Benjamin, Kandinsky, Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil-Paintings, London, 1984, vol. II, no. 936, illustrated p. 855; illustrated in colour p. 850

In 1922 Kandinsky joined the teaching staff at the Bauhaus, where he would remain for over a decade. A radically progressive establishment, the Bauhaus was dedicated to the pursuit of aesthetic theory and as a gathering place for many of the key figures of Modern art and design in Germany it provided the perfect backdrop to Kandinsky’s own theoretical and artistic experimentation.

Building on the publication of his seminal text Point and Line to Plane in 1923, Kandinsky used his teaching to continue his investigations into the interrelationship of colour and form. In line with Bauhaus principles, the classes Kandinsky gave were participatory rather than purely didactic, and the artist designed a series of exercises for his students that challenged them to investigate colour theory, with a specific focus on the relationship between different colours and the correspondence between colour and form. Among these exercises was one called 'Accenting the Centre; Balance, Above and Below' which comprised a simple grid with black and white in the centre and opposing or complementary colours arranged around this. Kandinsky may have had this – or a similar exercise – in mind when creating the careful balance of colours in the present work. As Clark V. Poling discusses: 'Color interrelationships were central to Kandinsky's concept of pictorial art and of the compositional process [...]. Occasionally Kandinsky's own works resemble color studies, specifically those in which he places simple shapes of different hues against uniform backgrounds in order to focus on the character of the individual colors and the subtle phenomena of chromatic intersections' (C. V. Poling in Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years 1915-1933 (exhibition catalogue), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1983, p. 65).

With a geometrical clarity that is typical of his later years in Dessau - where the Bauhaus relocated in 1925 - Fidel juxtaposes the ‘contrasting’ colours of yellow, orange, blue and green around a central axis of black and white. The tensions between these colours and the kinetic implications of the forms create the dynamic element that Kandinsky always strove for and hint at the suggestive playfulness of the work’s title.