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Lot Essay
Rot in Spitzform was executed in March 1925, a month before the Weimar Bauhaus re-located to Dessau, and at a time when the Bauhaus was moving towards a greater architectural and technological orientation. 'At this time Kandinsky created a more consistently geometric abstract style, which clearly showed the elements he had absorbed from the Russian avant-garde while it maintained his personal commitment to richly complex pictorial composition. In a series of major works he consolidated the geometric tendencies that had been developing in his art from 1919 and brought to the fore the schematic construction and other theoretical principles he emphasized in his teaching at the school' (C. V. Poling, Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years, 1915-1933, New York 1983, p. 49).
Central to Kandinsky's teaching was his theory of the relationship between colour and form, and his increasingly technical and scientific approach to his art led him to experiment with spatial concerns that would create a tension and dynamism between geometric forms. This tension is most pronounced in Rot in Spitzform between the circle and the triangle, which he described in his treatise Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane) of 1926 as 'the two primary, most strongly contrasting plane figures'. Thus the imposing geometry of the red triangle in the present work competes for compositional dominance with the infinite space encompassed by the circle, which, together with its halo, occupies the majority of what Kandinsky considered the lightest and most diffuse quadrant of the pictorial surface.
Central to Kandinsky's teaching was his theory of the relationship between colour and form, and his increasingly technical and scientific approach to his art led him to experiment with spatial concerns that would create a tension and dynamism between geometric forms. This tension is most pronounced in Rot in Spitzform between the circle and the triangle, which he described in his treatise Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane) of 1926 as 'the two primary, most strongly contrasting plane figures'. Thus the imposing geometry of the red triangle in the present work competes for compositional dominance with the infinite space encompassed by the circle, which, together with its halo, occupies the majority of what Kandinsky considered the lightest and most diffuse quadrant of the pictorial surface.