Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Vasily Kandinsky joined the faculty of the Bauhaus--an influential art and design school in Weimar, Germany--in 1922 and produced this print the following year for a portfolio published by the school's Graphic Workshop. The high quality of the image attests not only to the technical training promoted by the curriculum, but to its embrace of avant-garde design as well.

The work's title suggests a utopian vision of the future drawn from Russian Constructivism, and alludes to music (i.e., the ascent of a scale). In Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), Kandinsky wrote, "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul." In this print, Kandinsky uses four long, parallel, diagonal lines--like the strings of violin--to draw the viewers' eyes up from the lower left corner and then a cross "bow" angled toward the circle on the upper left.