Wassily Kandinsky

(probably) Nina Kandinsky, Paris

Galerie Maeght, Paris (probably acquired from the above by 1957)

Galerie Chalette, New York (acquired by 1957)

Louis & Julia Wasserman, Sandy Hook, Connecticut (acquired in 1957)

Estate of Julia Wasserman (acquired by descent from the above)

Acquired from the above

Galerie Rosengart, Lucerne, Kandinsky Exhibition: Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings, 1953, no. 4

Galerie Chalette, New York, Kandinsky, 1957, no. 17, illustrated in the catalogue 

The Artist's Handlist, vol. V, no 253

Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolours: Catalogue raisonné, Ithaca, 1994. vol. II, no. 841, illustrated p. 205

Scharf, executed in May 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 watercolors 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 colors 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 color.

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 and provided the perfect backdrop to Kandinsky’s own theoretical and artistic experimentation. Building on the publication of his seminal text Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane), in 1923, Kandinsky used his teaching to continue his investigations into the interrelationship of color 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 color theory, with a specific focus on the relationship between different colors and the correspondence between color 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 center and opposing or complementary colors arranged around this. Kandinsky may have had this – or a similar exercise – in mind when creating the careful balance of colors 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).

Kandinsky's years at Dessau were some of his most productive. His artistic development was strongly influenced by his Bauhaus colleague Paul Klee, whose watercolors and oil paintings of these years demonstrate similar artistic predilections. But Kandinsky's pictures possess a distinctive “musicality,” as we can see in the present composition. Graphic elements, such as the semicircular curve at upper center, sharp horizontal lines and punctuating circular marks are not unlike the elegant clefs, notes and bars of sheet music. Indeed, music was not far from Kandinsky's mind when he painted his most inspired compositions. "Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings," he famously wrote in Concerning the Spiritual in Art. "The artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key" (W. Kandinsky, "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," 1911, reprinted in C. Harrison & P. Wood, Art In Theory, 1900-1900, Oxford, 1992, p. 94).