Painted in 1923, Linienbrücke exemplifies Kandinsky's work during a period of sustained creativity and serves as a testament to the artist's continual efforts to push against and redefine the boundaries of modern art.

In 1922 Kandinsky was invited by Walter Gropius to join the teaching staff of the Bauhaus and this heralded a period of systematic experimentation for the artist (fig. 1), in which he ‘consolidated the geometric tendencies that had been developing in his art from 1919 and brought to the fore the schematic construction and other theoretical principles he emphasised in his teaching at the school’. (Clark V. Poling, Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years 1915-1933 (exhibition catalogue), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1983, p. 49). Whilst at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky taught a class on ‘The Theory of Form’ in which he encouraged his students to interrogate the relationship between form and colour. This idea was based on his belief that pictorial representation should be eschewed in favour of a truer, more spiritual form of abstraction in which colour would be allowed to ‘affect the entire human body as a physical organism’ and serve as ‘a means of exercising direct influence upon the soul’ (Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1910).

In 1911 Kandinsky had initiated a seismic shift through his adoption of a purely abstract style, but whereas his pre-First World War painting was characterised by a lyrical approach to colour and form, his work during the Bauhaus years focused increasingly on geometric forms. The years spent in Russia during the war were impactful; moving within Russian avant-garde circles he had witnessed the emergence of Suprematist painting (fig. 2) and the pure, geometric abstraction of those artists would inform Kandinsky’s work when he returned to Germany.

For the first time, he began to truly explore the ideas that he had set down over a decade earlier in his text Concerning the Spiritual in Art, producing works that explored more rigorously, ‘the modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of colour, for setting colour in motion, and so on’ (Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1910). These ideas are key to the careful, symphonious Linienbrücke: a work which, despite its use of a wide variety of colours and shapes, retains a delicate consonance. Indeed music and motion seem combined here; the drawn lines appear to vibrate across the composition and the separate ‘colour notes’ chime together beautifully. One of most intriguing elements is the rectangular shape in the upper left which appears to be a colour chart and certainly anticipates his more scientific interrogations of colour over the years to come.

There is a crisp precision to Linienbrücke that is typical of Kandinsky’s work in watercolour (fig. 3) and the colours remain fresh and remarkably vivid. The artist’s success with this medium was partly due to an innovative approach to technique: ‘Kandinsky was not a pure water-colourist in the traditional sense: he did not consistently exploit translucency, the subtle effects of cumulative washes or any of the other qualities unique to the medium. He used opaque body colour, ink and wash, pencil and chalk, often in one and the same composition. Determined to achieve unusual effects, he even mixed watercolours and oils on occasion, or added soap and other substances to his paint. In many of his works on paper the colours nevertheless achieve a brilliance and saturation rarely approached in his oils. Given the central importance of colour in his œuvre, it might therefore be argued that Kandinsky’s sensibilities found its fullest expression in his watercolours’ (F. Whitford, Kandinsky: Watercolours and other Works on Paper (exhibition catalogue), The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1999, p. 13).

Kandinsky evidently felt the work to be a true expression of his achievements from that period. Linienbrücke was among a group of works selected by the artist and Galka E. Scheyer (fig. 4) to be exhibited at The Blue Four show at the Daniel Gallery, New York in 1925 and then in Los Angeles the following year. A German-American artist and art dealer, Scheyer was instrumental in initiating the eponymous Blue Four – a group which consisted of Alexej von Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and his Bauhaus contemporaries Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger. Determined to introduce the radical principles of German Modernism to American collectors, Scheyer organized and hosted a series of now-celebrated exhibitions as well as giving lectures across the West Coast of America and then eventually, in New York. As such, both she and Linienbrücke itself, played a key role in establishing the international reputation of this innovative group of artists.