Untitled, No. 629

Artist Vassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866–1944)

Date1936

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensionscanvas: 130.5 x 81.4 cm (51 3/8 x 32 1/16 in.)

ClassificationsPaintings

Credit LineGift from the Estate of Mrs. Aldus Chapin Higgins

Object number1970.123

Label TextA founding member of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) and later a professor at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky was pivotal to German and Russian avant-garde art in the early 1900s. His treatise of 1912, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, advanced an aesthetic theory that assigned spiritual and emotional characteristics to colors and forms. Juxtaposing warm yellows and cold blues, for example, could produce corresponding “inner vibrations” in a person’s soul. Kandinsky painted this work in his later years in Paris, following his emigration from Germany after the rise of Nazism. Here, he invents new, fantastical forms that float freely in a space, liberated from the laws of gravity, interacting dynamically and playfully.ProvenanceThe artist; sold by the Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris, France, to Aldus Higgins, July, 1938; gift to the museum from the estate of Mrs. Aldus Chapin Higgins, Worcester MA, 1970.

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