Composition VIII

Circles, triangles, grids, and floating lines are arranged across a pale ground with cool precision and buoyant energy, every element balanced like notes in a score. Wassily Kandinsky painted Composition VIII during his years teaching at the Bauhaus, when his earlier stormy, lyrical abstraction gave way to this clear, geometric language. Now in the Guggenheim, it is among the major statements of his mature style - pure abstraction organized by exact, almost musical relationships of shape and color, the canvas a finely tuned cosmos of floating geometry answerable to nothing but its own inner harmony.