Wassily Kandinsky

Rudolf Probst, Dresden and Mannheim
Ferdinand Möller, Cologne
Emil Georg Bührle, Zurich (acquired from the above in July, 1955)
Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York
Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York (1977)
Private Collection, New Jersey
Sale: Galerie Wolfgang Ketterer, Munich, November 26-28, 1979, lot 980
Sale: Galerie Kornfeld, Berne, June 23, 1982, lot 316
M. Knoedler, Zurich

Halle, Hallischer Kunstverein and Städtisches Museum Moritzburg, Alte Garnisonskirche and Roter Turm, 1929

Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolours, Catalogue Raisonné, Volume Two, 1922-44, London, 1994, no. 936, illustrated p. 250

Vivian Endicott Barnett has written of Kandinsky, “Both in Russia and at the Bauhaus he set out . . . to furnish his own conception of art with what he regarded as a scientific basis, one that was transferable as a model to other arts.  There were bound to be conflicts; and one of the reasons for Kandinsky's failure in Moscow was that the younger artists, such as Rodchenko and Stepanova, did not share his approach.  The Bauhaus was very different:  expressionist, theosophical, socioromantic, and oriental ideas played a major part in the prehistory and immediate origins of the institution. But above all, Kandinsky was not alone in Weimar and Dessau.  There was his evident affinity with Klee, who . . . also regarded art as an analogy of creation itself.” (Vivian Endicott Barnett and Armin Zweite, Kandinsky, Watercolors and Drawings, Munich, 1992, p. 28)

Kandinsky was probably introduced to the use of the spray technique in his watercolors by Klee, his close friend and neighbor at the Dessau Bauhaus. Experimenting with it first in 1927, it was a technique that characterized most of his works on paper from 1928-30. Barnett has written of the spray technique “the elements begin to hover and glide, become transparent, and seem even more immaterial than other works of the Bauhaus period.” (Barnett, p. 28)