Wassily Kandinsky is regarded as the most important pioneer, or even the inventor, of abstract painting. Inspired by the landscape around Murnau and by music, especially the contemporary compositions of Arnold Schoenberg, Kandinsky developed an increasingly abstract compositional style in 1910–11. Although abstracted to the point of being mere pictorial symbols, this style still contained representational elements—mountains, church towers, boats, figures, and horsemen. These elements are also present in Kandinsky’s world-famous “Composition VII” (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) from 1913 and continue to recur in subsequent compositions. It was not until around 1920 that Kandinsky’s visual language, influenced by Russian Constructivism, began to evolve toward a strictly geometric abstraction. This process reached its absolute peak during his years at the Bauhaus. In the summer of 1921, Wassily Kandinsky took up a position at the Bauhaus in Weimar, teaching, among other things, the preparatory course “Analytical Drawing”, before he became head of the Form and Color Theory Department in 1925 after the Bauhaus had moved to Dessau. Here in Dessau, where Kandinsky lived in one of the Masters’ Houses together with Paul Klee, the composition—masterfully balanced in color and composition—was created in March 1929; Kandinsky included it in his handlist under the evocative title “Sachte” (Gentle). With the gentle yet intensely dynamic interplay between the two halves of the composition, developed from the complementary colors red and green, as well as its delicate, almost lyrical line structure and basic geometric forms, “Sachte” is an outstanding example of Kandinsky’s artistic interpretation of his famous treatise “Point and Line to Plane", an abstract art theory published in 1926 as part of the Bauhaus Books series. At the Bauhaus, Kandinsky’s abstraction reached its peak; far removed from any inspiration drawn from nature, he now ventured into strictly geometric, purely abstract pictorial symbols, which he boldly and progressively assembled into complex, masterfully composed pictorial systems. Kandinsky himself described this new approach as “cool abstraction” and published an article on it in Cicerone in 1925. The vocabulary of “cool abstraction” includes bundles of lines and checkerboard structures, circles, and triangles, which occasionally taper to form arrows. Kandinsky’s forms float freely in space or cluster around an imaginary center. Outlines are restrained and colors clarified. Compositions from this significant creative period can be found in major collections worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as the Centre Pompidou in Paris. [JS]