.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Executed in 1923, Ohne Titel reflects the growing complexity and experimental nature of Wassily Kandinsky’s watercolors during a pivotal moment of transition in his life and career. Having spent the War years in Russia, Kandinsky returned to Germany in 1921, and within a few months received an invitation from Walter Gropius to teach at the revolutionary art school known as the Bauhaus. Attracted to the innovative and inclusive educational program, the artist relocated to Weimar and joined the faculty in the summer of 1922, taking on classes for mural painting and analytical drawing. Filled with an array of colorful forms, Ohne Titel dates from Kandinsky’s first full year at the innovative and stimulating school and appears to be a synthesis of the different sources of inspiration and means of expression that fueled the artist’s creative imagination. At once recalling the artist’s semi-abstract landscapes of Murnau from before the First World War, and the increasingly geometric, Constructivist style that he was exploring during the early 1920s, Ohne Titel is a work that looks both to the past and the future, aligning itself to the earlier developments of Kandinsky’s bold form of abstraction and pointing the way forwards, towards the aesthetic that would dominate his work through the following decade.
Arranged along a dynamic diagonal line that runs across the full stretch of the sheet, a plethora of different elements overlap and converge to conjure a landscape-like vista—sharp zig-zagging lines suggest the jagged, stepped profiles of mountain ranges; cool, blue planes containing small triangular patterns evoke the movement of water and lakes; simple, colorful ovals set atop thin linear stalks appear to denote trees and vegetation; a collection of independent geometrical lines and smoothly curving arcs may be read as beams of sunlight, or even rainbows, connecting different aspects of the scene. The interplay between sharp ink lines and vibrant passages of gently modulated watercolor create a rich visual tension against the white ground of the sheet, allowing certain elements to draw more focus as our eye moves across the composition. In its translation of a more organic and nature-based abstraction into the harsher, geometric language he favored at the Bauhaus, Ohne Titel reflects the sharpening of Kandinsky’s focus on the mechanics of his own creativity at this time, as he sought to develop and distil his theories on form and color into an easily comprehensible method that could be shared with his students.
In the catalogue raisonné of the artist’s watercolors, Vivian Endicott Barnett has compared the composition of the present work to Kandinsky’s 1920 oil painting Spitzes Schweben (Roethel and Benjamin, no. 669; Location unknown), thus linking the watercolor to the evolution of the artist’s grand oil painting Composition VIII (Roethel and Benjamin, no. 701; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), which he completed in 1923 and considered “the high-point of his postwar achievement” (W. Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work, New York, 1958, p. 188). Ohne Titel remained in Kandinsky’s personal collection until his death, and subsequently passed into the possession of his widow Nina. It stayed with her until early 1972, and was purchased by Robert and Patricia Weis that March.
Arranged along a dynamic diagonal line that runs across the full stretch of the sheet, a plethora of different elements overlap and converge to conjure a landscape-like vista—sharp zig-zagging lines suggest the jagged, stepped profiles of mountain ranges; cool, blue planes containing small triangular patterns evoke the movement of water and lakes; simple, colorful ovals set atop thin linear stalks appear to denote trees and vegetation; a collection of independent geometrical lines and smoothly curving arcs may be read as beams of sunlight, or even rainbows, connecting different aspects of the scene. The interplay between sharp ink lines and vibrant passages of gently modulated watercolor create a rich visual tension against the white ground of the sheet, allowing certain elements to draw more focus as our eye moves across the composition. In its translation of a more organic and nature-based abstraction into the harsher, geometric language he favored at the Bauhaus, Ohne Titel reflects the sharpening of Kandinsky’s focus on the mechanics of his own creativity at this time, as he sought to develop and distil his theories on form and color into an easily comprehensible method that could be shared with his students.
In the catalogue raisonné of the artist’s watercolors, Vivian Endicott Barnett has compared the composition of the present work to Kandinsky’s 1920 oil painting Spitzes Schweben (Roethel and Benjamin, no. 669; Location unknown), thus linking the watercolor to the evolution of the artist’s grand oil painting Composition VIII (Roethel and Benjamin, no. 701; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), which he completed in 1923 and considered “the high-point of his postwar achievement” (W. Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work, New York, 1958, p. 188). Ohne Titel remained in Kandinsky’s personal collection until his death, and subsequently passed into the possession of his widow Nina. It stayed with her until early 1972, and was purchased by Robert and Patricia Weis that March.