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Lot Essay
With Itten's departure from the Bauhaus in 1923 and Moholy-Nagy's subsequent appointment, the revolutionary German art school gradually took a new direction away from its emphasis on individual, spiritual and largely hand-crafted art towards the creation of more universal, industrially mass-produced and functional products. This tendency to unite Art and technology increased with the school's move from Weimar to the industrial city of Dessau in 1925. In Dessau many of the school's craft workshops were closed (pottery, bookbinding and stained glass) and new technical departments, such as those teaching architecture and photography replaced them. In spite of this Kandinsky, who was widely considered to be part of the old guard at the Bauhaus, produced, in his first few years in Dessau, many of the most striking works of his life. Executed in 1929 Ausser Gewicht (Off-Balance) is an outstanding watercolour that reflects Kandinsky's successful synthesis of many of these tendencies during his time at the Dessau Bauhaus.
Kandinsky's work of the late 1920s is a refined development of his earlier years at the Bauhaus, stretching the logic of his constructivist geometry to the limit and ultimately achieving a sublime poetry of form that lies beyond rational explanation. Combining his innate sense of the mystical and spiritual purpose of art with the functional geometry of Constructivist form, Kandinsky produced a series of exquisite paintings and watercolours that stand halfway between science and mythology and look like a cross between an engineer's blueprint and the illustration of a fairy tale.
As its title suggests, Ausser Gewicht seems to test the logic of conventional composition by creating a harmonious pictorial construction from something that is deliberately asymmetrical and off-balance. This conscious and somewhat whimsical sense of play in the work probably reflects the influence of his friend and fellow Professor at the Bauhaus Paul Klee, who in conjunction with Kandinsky had recently begun to teach the new extra-curricular and long-requested course on painting at the Dessau school. In addition, the splatter-technique which Kandinsky used throughout this work was learnt directly from Klee.
Unlike Klee's work however, the harsh geometry and sparse use of form against a seemingly infinite background clearly owes much to Russian Constructivism and perhaps the early paintings of Moholy-Nagy. The antiseptic purity of constructivism however is subverted in a work such as Ausser Gewicht not only by its whimsical playfulness but also by the warm harmony of its colour. This infuses the painting with emotion, a certain sense of mysticism, and, above all else, communicates the unique individual genius of their creator's vision in a way that no purely utilitarian constructivist painting can.
Kandinsky's work of the late 1920s is a refined development of his earlier years at the Bauhaus, stretching the logic of his constructivist geometry to the limit and ultimately achieving a sublime poetry of form that lies beyond rational explanation. Combining his innate sense of the mystical and spiritual purpose of art with the functional geometry of Constructivist form, Kandinsky produced a series of exquisite paintings and watercolours that stand halfway between science and mythology and look like a cross between an engineer's blueprint and the illustration of a fairy tale.
As its title suggests, Ausser Gewicht seems to test the logic of conventional composition by creating a harmonious pictorial construction from something that is deliberately asymmetrical and off-balance. This conscious and somewhat whimsical sense of play in the work probably reflects the influence of his friend and fellow Professor at the Bauhaus Paul Klee, who in conjunction with Kandinsky had recently begun to teach the new extra-curricular and long-requested course on painting at the Dessau school. In addition, the splatter-technique which Kandinsky used throughout this work was learnt directly from Klee.
Unlike Klee's work however, the harsh geometry and sparse use of form against a seemingly infinite background clearly owes much to Russian Constructivism and perhaps the early paintings of Moholy-Nagy. The antiseptic purity of constructivism however is subverted in a work such as Ausser Gewicht not only by its whimsical playfulness but also by the warm harmony of its colour. This infuses the painting with emotion, a certain sense of mysticism, and, above all else, communicates the unique individual genius of their creator's vision in a way that no purely utilitarian constructivist painting can.