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Lot Essay
Kandinsky and his wife, Nina, moved from Weimar to Dessau with the Bauhaus group in 1925, and remained there until the school was finally closed by the National Socialists in 1932. Together, they lived in the master's house with Klee and his family, founding a close friendship which was to reflect upon their work.
Confiscated in 1937 as 'Entartete Kunst' from the Museum in Saarbrcken, Auf satten Flecken was amongst the fifty-seven works declared by the National Socialists as "Degenerate Art". Whereas Kandinsky's aesthetic objectives had previously been well received by many, his abstract paintings were severely attacked when the Entartete Kunst exhibition opened in 1937. The fourteen paintings exhibited were treated as a mass of incomprehensible smudges by the omission of titles and, in two cases, by being hung sideways. His previous success in Germany was denounced with the defamatory slogan, "Crazy at any price", painted on the wall near a large group of his work. (S. Barron, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, New York, 1991, p. 264)
Kandinsky was well aware of the National Socialists' attitude towards him. As he noted, "in Germany my position is especially bad, because I have three qualities, of which each alone is bad: 1) former Russian,
2) abstractionist, 3) former Bauhaus instructor until the last day of its existence." Indeed, his loyalty to the Bauhaus was later decried by the National Socialists who, on the walls of the Entartete Kunst exhibition, characterized the artist as, "Kandinsky, teacher at the Communist Bauhaus in Dessau." (op. cit., p. 264)
Confiscated in 1937 as 'Entartete Kunst' from the Museum in Saarbrcken, Auf satten Flecken was amongst the fifty-seven works declared by the National Socialists as "Degenerate Art". Whereas Kandinsky's aesthetic objectives had previously been well received by many, his abstract paintings were severely attacked when the Entartete Kunst exhibition opened in 1937. The fourteen paintings exhibited were treated as a mass of incomprehensible smudges by the omission of titles and, in two cases, by being hung sideways. His previous success in Germany was denounced with the defamatory slogan, "Crazy at any price", painted on the wall near a large group of his work. (S. Barron, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, New York, 1991, p. 264)
Kandinsky was well aware of the National Socialists' attitude towards him. As he noted, "in Germany my position is especially bad, because I have three qualities, of which each alone is bad: 1) former Russian,
2) abstractionist, 3) former Bauhaus instructor until the last day of its existence." Indeed, his loyalty to the Bauhaus was later decried by the National Socialists who, on the walls of the Entartete Kunst exhibition, characterized the artist as, "Kandinsky, teacher at the Communist Bauhaus in Dessau." (op. cit., p. 264)