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Lot Essay
1927 proved to be a prolific year for Kandinsky’s output of watercolours, and many of these works were among the most elaborate he had executed to date while teaching at the Bauhaus, both in the sheer profusion of forms and the complexity of their configuration on the sheet. In Aquarell für Frau Toni Kirchhoff, Kandinsky shows to great effect how he invented an exceptionally intricate spatial environment based on the sequencing and overlaying of planar forms, contrasted with a host of smaller, contrasting visual elements which interact within themselves as self-contained systems or with others as connected networks.
It is impossible to point to any one event that may have triggered this sudden production of exemplary works, but it should be noted that in 1927 the program and faculty of the Dessau Bauhaus, then in its second year of operation, was at the height of its form, and the influence of the school was being felt throughout Europe and in America. The roster of teachers included Lionel Feininger, Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, Johannes Itten and Oskar Schlemmer, under the directorship of the architect Walter Gropius. The lively exchange of ideas in the Dessau Bauhaus, running across the lines of various disciplines in the fine and applied arts, stimulated teachers and students alike, and the varieties of classroom experience greatly enriched Kandinsky's painting.
The emphasis on architecture and technological design in the Dessau Bauhaus curriculum encouraged Kandinsky, during the latter half of the 1920s, to experiment more broadly with geometric imagery, with specific attention to the broader possibilities of structuring pictorial space. The work of Paul Klee was especially important to Kandinsky during this period. From 1926, the two artists and their wives shared one of the new "Master's" double-houses that Gropius designed, leading to, as it was intended, increased personal as well as professional contact. Kandinsky admired Klee's improvisational approach to form and materials, the great variety of his subjects, and his ability to connect with the spiritual dimension in art through his astonishing flights of imagination and fantasy. Kandinsky was inspired to move beyond the conventional means of reproducing nature and external visual reality, seeking to establish a science of art based on the analysis of visual form and the distillation of reality into abstract forms, and to reveal the compositional principles that could be derived from them. The creation of line from points, and planes from lines, generated energy, rhythm and movement, and provided the basis for a new pictorial reality. Kandinsky noted that these aspects of composition were rooted in perceptual psychology, and he demonstrated, in turn, how they pointed the way to the spiritual dimension in art.
The present work from 1927, possibly dating specifically to 16 June, as per its dedication to its subject, Toni Kirchhoff, is an excellent example of the marriage of complex and often contradictory geometric forms, the sum of which creates a cohesive and lyrical ode to both the natural and spiritual realms. Antonie ‘Toni’ Kirchhoff was the wife of the esteemed Wiesbaden art collector, Heinrich Kirchhoff, who amassed one of the more important collections of German Impressionist and Modern art before the Second World War. Acting as both patrons and friends to some of the most important artists of the time, they were surrounded by and collected the work of such notable artists as Nolde, Klee, Kokoschka, Marc, Grosz, Felixmüller and Jawlensky amongst many other major examples of German Expressionism.
It is impossible to point to any one event that may have triggered this sudden production of exemplary works, but it should be noted that in 1927 the program and faculty of the Dessau Bauhaus, then in its second year of operation, was at the height of its form, and the influence of the school was being felt throughout Europe and in America. The roster of teachers included Lionel Feininger, Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, Johannes Itten and Oskar Schlemmer, under the directorship of the architect Walter Gropius. The lively exchange of ideas in the Dessau Bauhaus, running across the lines of various disciplines in the fine and applied arts, stimulated teachers and students alike, and the varieties of classroom experience greatly enriched Kandinsky's painting.
The emphasis on architecture and technological design in the Dessau Bauhaus curriculum encouraged Kandinsky, during the latter half of the 1920s, to experiment more broadly with geometric imagery, with specific attention to the broader possibilities of structuring pictorial space. The work of Paul Klee was especially important to Kandinsky during this period. From 1926, the two artists and their wives shared one of the new "Master's" double-houses that Gropius designed, leading to, as it was intended, increased personal as well as professional contact. Kandinsky admired Klee's improvisational approach to form and materials, the great variety of his subjects, and his ability to connect with the spiritual dimension in art through his astonishing flights of imagination and fantasy. Kandinsky was inspired to move beyond the conventional means of reproducing nature and external visual reality, seeking to establish a science of art based on the analysis of visual form and the distillation of reality into abstract forms, and to reveal the compositional principles that could be derived from them. The creation of line from points, and planes from lines, generated energy, rhythm and movement, and provided the basis for a new pictorial reality. Kandinsky noted that these aspects of composition were rooted in perceptual psychology, and he demonstrated, in turn, how they pointed the way to the spiritual dimension in art.
The present work from 1927, possibly dating specifically to 16 June, as per its dedication to its subject, Toni Kirchhoff, is an excellent example of the marriage of complex and often contradictory geometric forms, the sum of which creates a cohesive and lyrical ode to both the natural and spiritual realms. Antonie ‘Toni’ Kirchhoff was the wife of the esteemed Wiesbaden art collector, Heinrich Kirchhoff, who amassed one of the more important collections of German Impressionist and Modern art before the Second World War. Acting as both patrons and friends to some of the most important artists of the time, they were surrounded by and collected the work of such notable artists as Nolde, Klee, Kokoschka, Marc, Grosz, Felixmüller and Jawlensky amongst many other major examples of German Expressionism.