Ohne Titel

Radiant with colour and alive with rhythmic energy, Ohne Titel is a striking example of Wassily Kandinsky’s lifelong search for a universal visual language. Executed in 1940, just four years prior to the artist’s death, the composition reflects a style honed and developed over the course of his entire artistic career. Jagged diagonals, intersecting lines, and luminous triangular planes embody Kandinsky’s conviction that geometry could serve as a direct conduit to spiritual truth.
The triangle, above all, was Kandinsky’s most potent symbol. In his seminal text ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’, first published in 1911, Kandinsky described the triangle as a form of progression and ascent, with the broad base representing the masses and the narrow apex pointing upward to spiritual clarity. In Ohne Titel, that symbolism is given tangible form: jagged shards are thrust upward with kinetic urgency, conjuring both metaphysical striving and the turbulent energy of modernity in wartime Europe.
Kandinsky’s exploration of abstraction was inseparable from his rare condition of synaesthesia, which resulted in him experiencing colour as sound and sound as colour. So clear was this relationship that Kandinsky associated each note with an exact hue. In Ohne Titel, the work transforms into a symphony on paper, the taut diagonals and radiant triangular fields read almost like a musical score, orchestrated in harmony. Yet, masterfully this sharpness is harmonised against both the warm terracotta coloured paper, chosen by the artist, and the organic forms that dance past the rigid.
Works on paper played a crucial role in Kandinsky’s practice, offering a site of unmediated invention. Here, freed from the constraints of canvas, he pushes gouache to its limits, testing structures that are grounded in the geometric clarity of his Bauhaus period of the 1920s and early 1930s. Yet the sheet also retains the hand-drawn urgency of his Expressionist years at the turn of the 20th century; the lines are not coldly mechanical but fiercely insistent, their jagged energy recalling the emotional charge that underpins his most celebrated works.
The provenance of this work resonates with its quality; Nina Kandinsky, the artist’s second wife, who managed his works posthumously, gifted Ohne Titel to Will Grohmann. On the reverse of the artist’s mount, Nina writes: ‘À Cher Will Grohmann en souvenir de Kandinsky Nina Kandinsky le 4 XII 51 Neuilly s S', exemplifying the close relationship between the two even after Kandinsky’s passing. Grohmann was the artist’s foremost champion, biographer, and lifelong confidant with his scholarship being pivotal in shaping Kandinsky’s international reputation.
Works on paper from Kandinsky’s mature period are highly sought after for the immediacy with which they reveal the artist’s hand and thought. They are prized for their rarity, their intimacy, and their role in charting the evolution of abstraction. Thus, at once lyrical and rigorous, personal and universal, the present lot stands as a testament to Kandinsky’s enduring vision: that painting, like music, could reach beyond the visible world to touch the deepest chords of the human soul.