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Lot Essay
In 1922, Kandinsky joined the Bauhaus at Weimar, and moved with the school to Dessau in 1925. While at the Dessau Bauhaus in 1927, Kandinsky began his first experiments with the technique of spraying watercolor, which he learned from his friend and colleague Paul Klee. This spritztechnik, allowed Kandinsky to further manipulate the expressive potential of the watercolor medium, and to created spaces of varying intensities and depths. According to Barnett, "the elements begin to hover and glide, become transparent, and seem even more immaterial than other works of the Bauhaus period" (V. E. Barnett, exh. cat., Kandinsky, Watercolors and Drawings, Munich, 1992, p. 28). The spritztechnik also allowed the artist to push his compositions even further towards the abstract by blurring the edges of forms.
In Quadrat im Kreis, Kandinsky presents a precise visual synthesis of his aesthetic theories. In his groundbreaking treatise Point and Line to Plane of 1926, Kandinsky drew extensive parallels between sound (music), color, and line. He also outlines the basic primary forms of the circle, square and triangle, the qualities of which can be directly related to the primary colors blue, red and yellow, respectively:
"The cold-warm of the square and its definite plane-like nature, immediately become sign-posts point to red, which represents a midway point between yellow and blue and carries within it cold-warm characteristics
"The acute angle has a yellow color within
The obtuse angle increasingly loses its aggression, its piercing quality, its warmth, and is thereby, distantly related to a line without angles which constitutes the third primary, typical form of the plane -the circle. The passiveness in the obtuse angle, the almost missing forward tension, gives this angle a light blue tone" (p. 72-72).
The circle in particular held a particular attraction for Kandinsky. In a 1930 letter to Will Grohmann he wrote of the shape:
"It is a link with the cosmic. But I use it above all formally Why does the circle fascinate me? It is:
1. the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally,
2. precise, but inexhaustibly variable,
3. simultaneously stable and unstable,
4. simultaneously loud and soft,
5. a simple tension that carries countless tensions within it.
The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form, and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension." (quoted in Kandinsky: Russian and the Bauhaus Years, 1915-1933, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1983, p. 54).
In Quadrat im Kreis, Kandinsky presents a precise visual synthesis of his aesthetic theories. In his groundbreaking treatise Point and Line to Plane of 1926, Kandinsky drew extensive parallels between sound (music), color, and line. He also outlines the basic primary forms of the circle, square and triangle, the qualities of which can be directly related to the primary colors blue, red and yellow, respectively:
"The cold-warm of the square and its definite plane-like nature, immediately become sign-posts point to red, which represents a midway point between yellow and blue and carries within it cold-warm characteristics
"The acute angle has a yellow color within
The obtuse angle increasingly loses its aggression, its piercing quality, its warmth, and is thereby, distantly related to a line without angles which constitutes the third primary, typical form of the plane -the circle. The passiveness in the obtuse angle, the almost missing forward tension, gives this angle a light blue tone" (p. 72-72).
The circle in particular held a particular attraction for Kandinsky. In a 1930 letter to Will Grohmann he wrote of the shape:
"It is a link with the cosmic. But I use it above all formally Why does the circle fascinate me? It is:
1. the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally,
2. precise, but inexhaustibly variable,
3. simultaneously stable and unstable,
4. simultaneously loud and soft,
5. a simple tension that carries countless tensions within it.
The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form, and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension." (quoted in Kandinsky: Russian and the Bauhaus Years, 1915-1933, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1983, p. 54).