Created in July 1923, whilst Wassily Kandinsky was teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Lyrisch (Lyrical) is an exquisite example of the increasingly geometric abstract language employed by the artist during this period. Characterized by an almost self-surpassing precision, its rigorously abstract, geometric style implies the dominance of the cerebral over the emotional in the artist's visual conception, though the complexity of the present work, alive with dynamic tension, denies such simplification. Kandinsky's ongoing concern with the emotive qualities of pure color and form—set forth in his treatise Point and Line to Plane—demonstrates how passionately he understood his work. Indeed, the composition suggests Kandinsky's synesthetic response to music, whereby hearing a sound has produced a visualization of color and form. The centrifugal movement and escalating shapes are analogous to a musical crescendo, whilst the use of parallel lines recalls the bars on which music is composed. Elegantly balanced, meticulously detailed, and evocatively hued, Lyrisch is a quintessential example of Kandinsky’s utterly unique Bauhaus-era style.

Kandinsky consigned Lyrisch to Galka Scheyer between 1933 and 1945. A friend of Alexej von Jawlensky, Scheyer met Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Feininger in Weimar in 1924. That same year, Scheyer left Germany to settle in New York, where she planned to exhibit and promote the work of these four artists across the Atlantic. Through her efforts, they were dubbed “The Blue Four,” echoing the name of Der Blaue Reiter of the 1910s. Widely and frequently exhibited while in Scheyer’s collects ion, Lyrisch is a rare and important example from a pivotal moment in Kandinsky’s career, and an emblem of a significant friendship in the artist’s life.

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 color and its influence on the beholder. Executed 12 years later, Lyrisch takes these theories further, with its emphasis on the interconnectedness of shapes and hues and their harmonious placement within the composition. Kandinsky believed that particular arrangements of shapes triggered an "inner resonance" or "spiritual vibration," and could elicit from the viewer a powerful emotional response. Jagged polygons, arcs, grids, triangles and lines, whether overlapping or adjacent, serve to celebrate the beauty of form for form's sake. Analogous to the order and harmony of the cosmos, these abstract shapes offered Kandinsky a complete visual vocabulary which still retained a degree of representational value. Here, the progressive lines and looping arcs—entirely characteristic of Kandinsky's abstract works of this period— are juxtaposed against the angular squares and polygons, alternating between soft washes and saturated passages of pigment. In its thrilling combination of form and hue, Lyrisch is a magnificent example of Kandinsky’s creative and philosophical theories during this highly significant moment in his artistic career.

By the t.mes he executed the present work, Kandinsky was an active member of the Bauhaus, the school created by Walter Gropius for the advancement of modern art and architecture in Germany. Its rigorously modernist, abstracting style is entirely characteristic of the artist's works from this period and bears the influence of Bauhaus conceptual principles—the emphasis on architectural qualities of geometry and structure in particular. His stay at the Bauhaus seems to have brought out the intellectual, analytical side of his make-up, and both his writings and his work have an exacting, scientific quality, reflecting the prevailing ethos of the school. Frank Whitford suggests that where he had previously incorporated naturalistic motifs such as the “mountain,” in his Bauhaus period “he began and ended with purely abstract forms, endowing them with innately pictorial significance—warmth, hardness, recession, tension, motion, direction and the like.... Kandinsky's Bauhaus paintings are harder and cooler than anything he had done before. Energy, previously reflected in the attack with which the marks and colours were set down, is now conveyed by a dynamic tension between the compositional elements” (Exh. Cat., London, The Royal Academy of Arts, Kandinsky Watercolours and other Works on Paper, 1999, p. 69).

This shift to strict geometric forms also reflects the influence of Russian Constructivism, to which Kandinsky was exposed during the war years spent in Moscow. Constructivism was gaining international scope and becoming an important artistic force in Germany during this t.mes , where geometry was accepted as a universal artistic language. However, whilst developing this increasingly abstract vocabulary, Kandinsky's art did not fully adopt the practical, utilitarian quality characteristic of much of Constructivist art. Instead, the poetic and spiritual elements of his earlier works remained the underlying force of his art in the 1920s. Lyrisch reveals these dual strands of Kandinsky’s creative dialectic to intriguing effect, juxtaposing the angular forms of the polygons in the background with the meticulously arced semicircles which float across the rest of the composition, recalling musical notes. The result is a superb example of Kandinsky’s pioneering cultural language during a period of seminal development for the artist.