WASSILY KANDINSKY (1866-1944)

During the final period of his career, Kandindky’s painting, which he began to prefer to call ‘concrete’ rather than ‘abstract’, became to some extent a synthesis of the organic manner of the Munich period and the geometric manner of the Bauhaus one. The visual language that he had been aiming at since at least 1910 turned into collections of signs that look like almost-decipherable messages written in pictographs and hieroglyphs; many of the signs resemble aquatic larvae, and now and then there is a figurative hand or a lunar human face.
Painted in the spring of 1933, Blau in Rund und Spitz emerged at a time of great upheaval in Kandinsky’s life, as his tenure at the Bauhaus had just ended, following the school’s official dissolution on the first of October 1932. The evocative palette, with brown being associated with the Nazis, and the austhere composition of simple formal elements -rectangle, circular arc, and triangle- lightly drawn on a flat surface, seem to summarize the historical context of the time he was living.