Quadrat is a vivid illustration of Kandinsky’s highly innovative years at the Bauhaus school in Germany; marking the most productive phase in his career, the works of this period are characterised by an interrogation of colour and form. He was first invited to join the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1921, where the promoted ideal of the combination of art with crafts came to shape his practice. The following year he was offered a teaching position, enabling him to impart his ideas concerning abstraction to his students, redefining pre-established concepts of art and design. In his Point and Line to Plane, published in 1926, Kandinsky advocated a return within the arts to the essential compositional elements of the line and the plane, laying out the aesthetic principles that were carried out in the paintings created during those years. He stressed the need to consider the effect on human psychology of the juxtaposition of distinct colours and forms, together with their placement and orientation within the canvas.

The present work exemplifies Kandinsky’s rejection of figuration in favour of geometric abstraction. The organic forms of his previous works are substituted by three distinct planes, each in the form of a grid and of different chromatic palettes. The pattern of black and green-grey rhomboids provides a subtly muted background for the composition, but also echoes some tonalities reprised in the multicoloured central plane. The repetition of colours through the different planes is essential to the rhythm of the composition. The positioning of the two central planes, arranged at different angles and giving the impression of floating in an illusory space with no precise limits, also contribute to this dynamic visual spectacle. The artist himself described this effect in his paintings, writing: ‘The recession and advance of the form elements draw the [picture plane] forward (toward the observer) and backward in depth (away from the observer), so that the [picture plane], like an accordion, is pulled apart in both directions. The colour elements possess this power to a high degree’ (W. Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, New York, 1947, p. 124). Kandinsky did not limit this visual experiment to the repetition of angular geometric forms, but also turned to the basic element of the circle in his search for compositional balance (fig. 1).

The work also illustrates the close friendship between the Russian artist and fellow-artist Paul Klee (fig. 2). The two men taught together at the Bauhaus from 1922 and, following its relocation from Weimar to Dessau in 1926, shared housing in the estate designed by Walter Gropius. Their mutual concern with abstraction and spirituality within art often resulted in similar compositions, which in turn reveal the flow of their dialogue (figs. 3 & 4). Reportedly there were t.mes s when even close colleagues such as Oskar Schlemmer found it hard to tell their works apart, as he observed when visiting an exhibition in 1932: 'Kandinsky: so close to Klee now that at first I thought Kandinsky was missing and only later realised that I had taken his paintings for Klee’s' (O. Schlemmer quoted in Klee & Kandinsky: Neighbours, Friends & Rivals (exhibition catalogue), Paul Klee Zentrum, Bern, 2015, p. 50). However, while Klee remained anchored to a more organic approach, Kandinsky favoured a more rigorous and systematic exploration of abstract forms. This difference is embodied in Klee’s choices of title, Blühendes and Abend in N, which maintain a relationship with material reality, as opposed to Kandinsky’s use of a purely geometric term.

In his teaching at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky placed great emphasis on the value of primary and complementary colours. In Quadrat this is reflected in the rhythmic repetition of yellow, blue and red, which contributes to the feeling of patterned visual harmony. He also praised the black-white contrast as the key to absolute claritys , which he believed to be central to modernity. This checkerboard pattern is a recurrent motif in Kandinsky’s abstract works from earlier in the decade, however, in the present work, it becomes the focal point of the composition. It is in this section that the transcendental experience is achieved: the monochromatic plane is angled to give the illusory impression of gradually disappearing into the centre of the canvas, almost like a black hole. Quadrat achieves a unity of colours and forms through the intersection of grid-patterned planes that allows the viewer to lose sight of the material world; it achieves something of the ‘spiritual in art’ that Kandinsky aspired to when he described it as a ‘language which speaks to the soul’ (W. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, New York, 1946, p. 93). Kandinsky’s employment of the grid-pattern suggests a visual link with Piet Mondrian’s neo-plastic works in their mutual pursuit of compositional harmony through the return to essential geometric forms (fig. 5).

A visually compelling work, Quadrat exemplifies Kandinsky’s painting from this period. In their meticulous and theoretical exploration of abstract forms, Kandinsky’s Bauhaus works are the consolidation of his ground-breaking experiments with abstraction from before the First World War. These early works established Kandinsky as the father of abstraction, but it was his continued exploration of abstract forms and his preoccupation with the spiritual significance of colour in particular, that would have a profound impact on movements such as Abstract Expressionism later in the century.