Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

A complex mixture of pure abstraction and geometric compositional elements, Dünner druck (Subtle Pressure) is an intricate, richly detailed work executed by Kandinsky in February 1924 during his second year of teaching at the Weimar Bauhaus. As its title suggests, this work, like much of Kandinsky's oeuvre from this period, is a formal exercise in counterpoint that directly explores the nature of tensions created by a carefully orchestrated composition of purely abstract geometric form and color.
Influenced by his encounters with the Constructivist artists Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko during his years in Russia, Kandinsky began to introduce carefully angled, hard-edged geometrical elements to his work. This new approach is particularly evident in the present composition, where a series of precise perpendicular and vertical lines are created with the assistance of a ruler. These lines surround the perimeter of the composition in an attempt to contain the more free-floating curves and squiggles within. In a nod to the title of the work, the sense of pressure appears to have jostled the remaining hard-edged lines to haphazard, diagonal positions. Generating tensions and counter-tensions, these shapes hang together in a series of complex relationships and associations that lends Dünner druck a vibrant internal energy and dynamism. In an interesting take on words and meaning, the catalogue raisonné provides an alternate translation of “Subtle pleasure.” In this way, the present work embodies Kandinsky’s aim “to create by pictorial means…pictures that as purely pictorial objects have their own, independent, intense life” (Kandinsky, quoted in K. Lindsay and P. Vergo, eds., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, New York, 1994, p. 345).