.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
'If a force coming from outside moves the point in any direction, the first type of line comes about, where the direction embarked on remains unchanged, and the line has a tendency to run straight on to infinity. This is the straight line, which as regards its tension thus represents the infinite possibility of movement in its most concise form.' (W. Kandinsksy in Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, 1926).
Drawn in 1925, Zeichnung für 'Punkt und Linie zu Fläche' (Study for ‘Point and Line to Plane’) is the most important of the black-and-white drawings that Wassily Kandinsky executed to illustrate his treatise of the same name, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche. The essay, published in 1926, represents the summation of the artist's methods and teachings during the period he spent at the Bauhaus in Weimar, when he sought to use geometric abstraction as a means of expressing a spiritual dimension in art. These drawings are amongst the most analytical and refined in the artist's abstract œuvre, and exemplify the artist's gradual move away from the free flowing, irregular lines and shapes of his earlier years, towards a purer form of geometric abstraction.
The present work, that Kandinsky himself described as ‘inner relationship between complex of straight lines and curve [left-right] for the picture Black Triangle’ (Wassily Kandinsky quoted in V. Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Drawings, vol. I, Munich, 2006, p. 306), is directly related to the 1925 painting Schwarzes Dreieck, today in the Museum Boymans van Beuningens, Rotterdam. Dispensing with colour, in the present drawing each line and shape holds an emotional significance, and within the abstraction, movement and rhythm is created from the relationship between the geometric forms.
Drawn in 1925, Zeichnung für 'Punkt und Linie zu Fläche' (Study for ‘Point and Line to Plane’) is the most important of the black-and-white drawings that Wassily Kandinsky executed to illustrate his treatise of the same name, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche. The essay, published in 1926, represents the summation of the artist's methods and teachings during the period he spent at the Bauhaus in Weimar, when he sought to use geometric abstraction as a means of expressing a spiritual dimension in art. These drawings are amongst the most analytical and refined in the artist's abstract œuvre, and exemplify the artist's gradual move away from the free flowing, irregular lines and shapes of his earlier years, towards a purer form of geometric abstraction.
The present work, that Kandinsky himself described as ‘inner relationship between complex of straight lines and curve [left-right] for the picture Black Triangle’ (Wassily Kandinsky quoted in V. Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Drawings, vol. I, Munich, 2006, p. 306), is directly related to the 1925 painting Schwarzes Dreieck, today in the Museum Boymans van Beuningens, Rotterdam. Dispensing with colour, in the present drawing each line and shape holds an emotional significance, and within the abstraction, movement and rhythm is created from the relationship between the geometric forms.