Kleine Welten VI (Small Worlds VI), Vassily Kandinsky

Exhibition Label: "Machine in a Void: World War I & the Graphic Arts," Mar-2010, Steve Goddard Kandinsky, who had exhibited with the Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) in Munich before the War, was obliged to leave Germany for his native Russia the moment war broke out in August 1914. Kandinsky remained highly active in the arts while in Russia through the war years and during the early revolutionary period. He returned to Germany when he was invited to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimer, beginning in 1922. This woodcut is from the handsome portfolio of 12 prints made by Kandinsky during his first year at the Bauhaus. Archive Label 2003: Kandinsky revolutionized modernism in 1910 with what is considered to be the first purely non-representational painting. During World War I, the artist was forced to leave Germany and return to Moscow. There, he continued to paint, taking several posts under the Bolsheviks, but he never joined the Party or felt he belonged in the new state. In 1922, Kandinsky was invited to join the faculty of the Bauhaus back in Weimar, Germany, and he gladly accepted. He taught at the school until its closure by the Nazi government in 1933. Even though he had obtained German citizenship, Hitler’s policies forced him to seek refuge in Paris. While he was in exile, the Nazis included many of Kandinsky’s works in the infamous “Entartete Kunst” [Degenerate Art] exhibition in 1937, ridiculing all modernist pieces and the artists who created them. All twelve of Kandinsky’s prints from this Bauhaus portfolio, Kleine Welten, were shown, along with many of his paintings that expressed his system for color harmonics and geometric vocabulary. Kandinsky always believed the Nazi regime could not last, but he died in 1944 while in still in exile.