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Lot Essay
The title of this work, Dunst or Grüner Dunst, like many of Kandinsky's Bauhaus works on paper, reflects the general atmosphere generated by the carefully orchestrated composition of coloured geometric forms on the picture plane. The juxtaposition of an emotive and often paradoxical title with the strongly analytical nature of the hard geometry of his abstract compositions was intended to coax the viewer into an understanding of the experimental and investigatory nature of Kandinsky's art.
As a work like Dunst shows, Kandinsky's translation of his earlier more organic and nature-based abstractions into the geometric language he used at the Bauhaus reflects the sharpening of his focus on the mechanics of his own creativity. Believing that 'Form itself, even if completely abstract...has its own inner sound' to the point where it becomes 'a spiritual being' with its own 'spiritual perfume', Kandinsky sought through pictorial theory to discover the rules of an underlying and universal order of harmony that he believed lay at the root of all creation.
Many of his geometric watercolours from the Weimar and the earlier Dessau Bauhaus reflect the analytical nature that his research took. 'The teaching of drawing at the Bauhaus' Kandinsky maintained, 'is an education in looking, precise observation, and the precise representation not of the external appearance of an object, but of constructive elements, the laws that govern the forces (=tensions) that can be discovered in given objects and of their logical construction' (in "Analytisches Zeichnen" Bauhaus, 1928, cited in Wassily Kandinsky : Complete Writings on Art, Boston, 1982, p. 729).
As a work like Dunst shows, Kandinsky's translation of his earlier more organic and nature-based abstractions into the geometric language he used at the Bauhaus reflects the sharpening of his focus on the mechanics of his own creativity. Believing that 'Form itself, even if completely abstract...has its own inner sound' to the point where it becomes 'a spiritual being' with its own 'spiritual perfume', Kandinsky sought through pictorial theory to discover the rules of an underlying and universal order of harmony that he believed lay at the root of all creation.
Many of his geometric watercolours from the Weimar and the earlier Dessau Bauhaus reflect the analytical nature that his research took. 'The teaching of drawing at the Bauhaus' Kandinsky maintained, 'is an education in looking, precise observation, and the precise representation not of the external appearance of an object, but of constructive elements, the laws that govern the forces (=tensions) that can be discovered in given objects and of their logical construction' (in "Analytisches Zeichnen" Bauhaus, 1928, cited in Wassily Kandinsky : Complete Writings on Art, Boston, 1982, p. 729).