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Lot Essay
Held in the same private collection for the past fifty years, Wassily Kandinsky’s Schwarze Begleitung embodies many of the key elements which defined the artist’s visionary approach to abstraction during the early 1920s. Against an amorphous, dark black ground, an array of bright, colourful geometric elements converge and overlap in a complex pattern, each form held in place by a vivid internal energy. Executed in December 1923, this dynamic, lyrical composition in watercolour and India ink, is a study for an oil painting of the same title, which the artist worked on from March to June the following year (Roethel and Benjamin, no. 713; Private collection). As such, Schwarze Begleitung demonstrates the close connection between Kandinsky’s oils and watercolours during this period, as he worked across different media to develop his artistic theories, exploring and testing the visual potential of his ideas, before setting his brush to canvas.
Having spent the war years in Russia, Kandinsky returned to Germany in 1921, and within a few months had received an invitation from Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus. Attracted to the school’s innovative and inclusive educational programme, the artist relocated to Weimar and joined the faculty, taking on the classes for mural painting and analytical drawing. As Frank Whitford has noted, ‘Kandinsky’s interest in theory equipped him perfectly to teach at the Bauhaus. His understanding of (and his ability to explain) colour, form and their inherent visual and emotional qualities contributed to the development of a pictorial language that could be applied with equal success to the design of tapestries, stained glass or chairs’ (Kandinsky, London, 1999, p. 65). The artist’s arrival at the Bauhaus in 1922 also coincided with a general shift in the school’s aims and approach, moving away from its original utopian Expressionist aesthetic, towards a more practical and utilitarian constructivist ideal. As a result, Kandinsky’s works from these pivotal years are marked by an increasingly methodical, geometric aesthetic, stimulated by his engagement with his fellow teachers, the students, and the Bauhaus curriculum.
This new approach is particularly evident in Schwarze Begleitung, where the series of sharp lines, precise circles and piercing, angular forms appear to have been created with the assistance of a compass and ruler. In the lower left corner, meanwhile, a sinuous, flowing shape offers an intriguing counterpoint to the strict regularity of the other elements, its free-form curves and contours suggesting a more organic source. Generating tensions and counter-tensions, these shapes hang together in a series of complex relationships and associations, their forms abutting and interacting with one another in rich configurations, conjuring a vibrant internal energy and dynamism. These connections and contrasts are further enhanced by Kandinsky’s use of colour within the work—by grounding the composition in a cloud of dark pigment, he allows the visual power of this interplay of bright colours to increase, each subtle shift in hue or delicate variation in tone from one form to the next more impactful. In this way, the painting embodies Kandinsky’s aim ‘to create by pictorial means […] pictures that as purely pictorial objects have their own, independent, intense life’ (quoted in K. Lindsay and P. Vergo, eds., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, New York, 1994, p. 345).
Having spent the war years in Russia, Kandinsky returned to Germany in 1921, and within a few months had received an invitation from Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus. Attracted to the school’s innovative and inclusive educational programme, the artist relocated to Weimar and joined the faculty, taking on the classes for mural painting and analytical drawing. As Frank Whitford has noted, ‘Kandinsky’s interest in theory equipped him perfectly to teach at the Bauhaus. His understanding of (and his ability to explain) colour, form and their inherent visual and emotional qualities contributed to the development of a pictorial language that could be applied with equal success to the design of tapestries, stained glass or chairs’ (Kandinsky, London, 1999, p. 65). The artist’s arrival at the Bauhaus in 1922 also coincided with a general shift in the school’s aims and approach, moving away from its original utopian Expressionist aesthetic, towards a more practical and utilitarian constructivist ideal. As a result, Kandinsky’s works from these pivotal years are marked by an increasingly methodical, geometric aesthetic, stimulated by his engagement with his fellow teachers, the students, and the Bauhaus curriculum.
This new approach is particularly evident in Schwarze Begleitung, where the series of sharp lines, precise circles and piercing, angular forms appear to have been created with the assistance of a compass and ruler. In the lower left corner, meanwhile, a sinuous, flowing shape offers an intriguing counterpoint to the strict regularity of the other elements, its free-form curves and contours suggesting a more organic source. Generating tensions and counter-tensions, these shapes hang together in a series of complex relationships and associations, their forms abutting and interacting with one another in rich configurations, conjuring a vibrant internal energy and dynamism. These connections and contrasts are further enhanced by Kandinsky’s use of colour within the work—by grounding the composition in a cloud of dark pigment, he allows the visual power of this interplay of bright colours to increase, each subtle shift in hue or delicate variation in tone from one form to the next more impactful. In this way, the painting embodies Kandinsky’s aim ‘to create by pictorial means […] pictures that as purely pictorial objects have their own, independent, intense life’ (quoted in K. Lindsay and P. Vergo, eds., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, New York, 1994, p. 345).