Composition VIII
Composition VIII
Wassily Kandinsky · 1923
01
Weimar. July 1923.
Kandinsky is teaching at the Bauhaus.
He calls only ten paintings Compositions.
This is the eighth.
02
Top left. One black circle.
Ringed in pink.
Every smaller circle answers to it.
03
On the right, the opposite.
Straight lines. Sharp angles.
Circle against edge.
04
Kandinsky called it the high point
of everything he'd painted since the war.
And this circle is where his circles start.
The whole composition.
Circle, line, angle.
“The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions.”
Three of ten
Kandinsky painted ten Compositions.
The first three were destroyed in the Second World War.
Photographs are all that's left.
In 1937 the Nazis seized 57 of his works.
Composition VIII was already Solomon Guggenheim's.
Bought straight from Kandinsky's studio in Dessau.
Wassily Kandinsky
Russian · Abstract · 1866 to 1944
Sources · 5