Blau in Rund und Spitz

Details

WASSILY KANDINSKY (1866-1944)
Blau in Rund und Spitz
signed with the monogram and dated '33' (lower left); dated, numbered and inscribed ‘No 505 1933 "Blau im Rund und Spitz" "Bleu en rond et aigu"' (on the reverse of the artist’s mount)
watercolour on paper laid down on the artist's mount
Image: 16 ½ x 22 1/8 in. (42.1 x 56.8 cm.)
Artist's mount: 23 ½ x 29 in. (59.8 x 73.8 cm.)
Executed in May 1933

Provenance

Nina Kandinsky, Paris, by descent from the artist.
Galerie Maeght, Paris, by 1957.
Saidenberg Gallery, New York.
James Wise, Geneva, by 1962.
Heinz Berggruen, Paris.
Hans J. Ziersch, Munich, by 1966.
Anonymous sale, Ketterer, Munich, 25 November 1981, lot 680.
Aquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Literature

The artist's handlist of watercolours, no. 505.
'In the Galleries', in Arts, vol. 31, no. 5, February 1957, p. 55.
V. Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolours: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, 1922-1944, New York, 1994, no. 1125, p. 367 (illustrated).

Exhibited

Paris, Cahiers d'art, W. Kandinsky: nouvelles toiles, acquarelles, dessins, June - September 1935.
Bern, Kunsthalle Bern, Wassily Kandinsky, Französische Meister Der Gegenwart, February - March 1937, no. 76.
New York, Kleemann Galleries, Wassily Kandinsky, January 1957, no. 13 (illustrated; catalogued with inverted dimensions).

Special notice

This lot has been imported from outside of the UK for sale and placed under the Temporary Admission regime. Import VAT is payable at 5% on the hammer price. VAT at 20% will be added to the buyer’s premium but will not be shown separately on our invoice.

Sale room notice

Please note that the correct medium for this work is 'watercolour on paper laid down on the artist's mount' and not as stated in the printed gallery guide.

Conditions of sale

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Lot Essay

During the final period of his career, Kandindky’s painting, which he began to prefer to call ‘concrete’ rather than ‘abstract’, became to some extent a synthesis of the organic manner of the Munich period and the geometric manner of the Bauhaus one. The visual language that he had been aiming at since at least 1910 turned into collections of signs that look like almost-decipherable messages written in pictographs and hieroglyphs; many of the signs resemble aquatic larvae, and now and then there is a figurative hand or a lunar human face.
Painted in the spring of 1933, Blau in Rund und Spitz emerged at a time of great upheaval in Kandinsky’s life, as his tenure at the Bauhaus had just ended, following the school’s official dissolution on the first of October 1932. The evocative palette, with brown being associated with the Nazis, and the austhere composition of simple formal elements -rectangle, circular arc, and triangle- lightly drawn on a flat surface, seem to summarize the historical context of the time he was living.

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