Wassily Kandinsky

Maurice Raynal, Paris (a gift from the artist in March 1930)
Sale: Kornfeld & Klipstein, Bern, 29th May 1964, lot 525
R. M. Light, Boston, 1964
B.C. Holland, Chicago (possibly)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in the 1960s

Artist's handlist, Watercolours, listed as 'xii 1925, 198, Zartes Gemüt'
Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolours, Catalogue Raisonné, 1922-1924, vol. II, New York, 1994, no. 761, illustrated p. 150

Executed on cream wove paper, laid down by the artist on black card, floating in the mount. The artist's mount is attached to the overmount at two points along the upper edge. All four edges are deckled. There is a pinhead-sized area of paper skinning to the centre of the sheet. Apart from a few minor spots of foxing and some very light surface dirt to the sheet, mainly to the edges, this work is in very good condition. Colours: The paper tone is more cream and overall less red in the original.
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Kandinsky completed the present work in 1925 while he was teaching at the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius' school of avant-garde art and architecture in Germany. The Bauhaus had relocated to Dessau from Weimar in 1925, and Kandinsky found the living and working conditions extremely favourable in this new environment. Radical examples of modern architecture were constructed for workshops and faculty residences, and Kandinsky shared a house with Paul Klee that overlooked the park. Kandinsky's years at Dessau were some of his most productive, during which time he completed several series, such as his 'black-and-white' paintings and his symbolic 'circle' paintings, as well as many other significant works. His artistic development was strongly influenced, no doubt, by his Bauhaus colleague Klee, whose watercolours of these years demonstrate similar artistic predilections. At the Bauhaus, Kandinsky experimented with concepts of abstraction, form and colour, which he articulated in his book Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane), published in 1923, a widely-read book about the governing aesthetic principles in his art (see Fig 1).  Zartes Gemüt embodies the artistic theories that Kandinsky championed at this highly theoretical and influential point in his career.

The aesthetic theories governing many of Kandinsky's compositions throughout his career derived from his 1911 treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, in which he praised the power of colour and its influence on the beholder. Zartes Gemüt takes these theories further, with its emphasis on the individuality of shapes and their harmonious placement within a composition. Kandinsky believed that particular arrangements of shapes triggered an 'inner resonance' or 'spiritual vibration,' and could elicit from a viewer a powerful emotional response. Jagged solid forms, arcs, grids, triangles and circles, whether overlapping or adjacent, were strictly non-representational and created only to celebrate the beauty of form for form's sake.
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), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1983, p. 51).

The original owner of the present work, Maurice Raynal, was a critic and art historian and founded L'Intransigeant with E. Tériade. The magazine published a questionnaire that Kandinsky filled out in 1929.

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Fig. 1, Oskar Schlemmer, Point-Line-Plane (Kandinsky), Pen and ink and collage on paper, 1928, Oskar Schlemmer Archive, State Gallery, Stuttgart