• This work of art was painted in 1923, a whole ten years after Composition VII

The slogan of the Bauhaus was “Art and Technology – A New Unity”, showing a post-war, utopian state of mind that was nurtured among the artists. The curriculum of the school was interdisciplinary and well-rounded; its students had opportunities to learn everything from crafts to architecture, painting, dance, music, eastern philosophies and religion. Members of the Bauhaus believed that “no essential difference between the artist and craftsman” exists, and technology and spiritual growth were co-dependent.

Kandinsky’s transition into abstraction is triggered by his spirituality, but in this period also influenced by the ideas of the Bauhaus community: how to link the imaginary and real and apply abstractly designed solutions to real-world problems. The book he wrote after “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” shows the vast inspiration in his schools work even in its title: “From Point to Line to Plane”. The artist began combining emotional with the mechanical, the intuitive with the rational, the mystical with the engineered, asking his very self questions like “Why does the circle fascinate me?”. The circle indeed became the focal point of a number of his studies. He wrote about it:
“It is the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally, a precise but inexhaustible variable, simultaneously stable and unstable, simultaneously loud and soft, a single tension that carries countless tensions within it. The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. . . . Of the three primary forms (triangle, square, circle), it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.”

Composition VIII shows a lot of influence Russia left on Kandinsky before he came to Germany to teach at the Bauhaus. The artist began using forms as main compositional elements instead of color, like in his previous works. That becomes maybe the most important characteristic in his post-war art. He began experimenting with the impact a shape can produce when combined with a certain color. He energizes their geometry, surrounding one circle with a blue, calm halo and coating another red and black, more sinister colors. The right angle formed by two thin black lines is filled with blue and an acute angle with pink. Those contrasts provide the dynamic balance. The coloring of the background also gives a dynamic element to the whole scene, making forms look like they float in an undefined space, instead of it being a geometrical exercise on a flat, simple plane. Background colors are layered, from blue to yellow and give it depth in which the forms recede, giving the painting a push-pull effect.