Wassily Kandinsky

Richard G. Leahy, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
E.V. Thaw, New York
Galerie Krugier, Geneva (acquired by 1968)
Galerie Tarica, Paris
Jacques Benador, Geneva (acquired from the above in 1969)
Galerie Jacques Benador, Geneva 
Private Collection, Italy (acquired from the above in 1979 and sold: Christie's, London, April 3, 1979, lot 127)
Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York (and sold: Sotheby's, London, July 1, 1987, lot 471)
Acquired at the above sale

Berlin, Galerie Nierendorf, Kandinsky, 1923
Geneva, Musée Rath, L'Art du XXe siècle: Collections genevoises, 1973, no. 55, illustrated in the catalogue
New York, Leonard Hutton Galleries, Jawlensky & Major German Expressionists, 1980-81, no. 17, illustrated in color in the catalogue
New York, Leonard Hutton Galleries, The Blue Four: Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky and Paul Klee, 1984, no. 42, illustrated in color in the catalogue

The Artist's Handlist, Watercolors, no. 35
Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolors: Catalogue Raisonné, 1922-1944, vol. II, Ithaca, New York, 1994, no. 586, illustrated p. 43

Executed on cream wove paper which has not been laid down. The sheet is attached to the backing board with tape on all four corners and around the periphery of the verso of the sheet. The left edge is serrated, indicative of coming out of a sketchbook. There are repaired pin dot holes to the four corners of the sheet. There is some uniform light time fading to the sheet and the pigments. The medium is nevertheless strong. There is some minor scattered surface dirt, particularly in the four corners of the sheet. There is a horizontal repaired tear to the right edge of the paper located approximately a quarter of the way down. There is a small repaired section to the paper in the upper left quadrant in the background (measuring approximately 1/3 in. by 1/8 in.). There are repaired losses to the upper left corner of the paper. There are a small number of very minor repaired tears around the periphery of the sheet (each measuring no more than a 1/4 in.). There is a light undulation to the paper. There are extremely faint spots of foxing, most notably visible in the lower right and lower left quadrants. The work is in overall good condition.
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The present watercolor was executed just a few months after Kandinsky's return from Moscow to Germany in June 1922, when he started teaching at the Bauhaus school in Weimar. He quickly became immersed again in the German art world: he participated in a number of exhibitions, and his teachings and writings were crucial to the development of abstract art internationally. Created during this important period of transition, Composition lyrique exemplifies the artist’s gradual move away from the free flowing, irregular lines and shapes of his earlier years, towards a more geometric form of abstraction. His watercolors and paintings of this period are dominated by circles, triangles and straight lines rather than by undefined shapes and loosely applied paint. This shift to strict geometric forms reflects the influence of Russian Constructivist art, to which he was exposed during the war years spent in Moscow.

It was owing to artists such as Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy that constructivist art continued to gain international recognition during the early 1920s and become an important artistic force in Germany, where geometry became accepted as a universal artistic language. In the present work, a complex network of intersecting planes set against a pure white background builds a structural tension in the composition; the soft, undulating lines, remnants of Kandinsky’s earlier style, balance the sharpness of the geometric forms, infusing the work with a poetic, playful character. In the present watercolor and the group of works executed in the months prior, the artist experimented with his ideas about abstraction, form and color, which he articulated in his book Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane), published in 1923.

Writing about this pivotal period in Kandinsky’s art, Clark Poling commented: "Basic shapes and straight and curved lines predominate in these paintings, and their black lines against white or light backgrounds maintain a schematic and rigorous quality. The large size and transparency of many of the forms and their open distribution across the picture plane give these compositions a monumentality and an expansiveness despite their relative flatness. Whereas certain abstract features of the series derive from Russian precedents, their vertically positioned triangles and planetary circles refer to landscape… Nevertheless, the transparency of forms, their rigorous definition and floating quality maintain the abstract character of the work" (Clark Poling, Kandinsky, Bauhaus and Russian Years (exhibition catalogue), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1983, p. 51).