• Kandinsky painted this work in 1931
• It was executed with tempera and ink on paper
• Dimensions of the painting are 16.4 in by 19.8 in (41.7 cm by 50.3 cm)
• Name of the painting in German is Zeichenreihen

During the early 1930s the atmosphere at the Dessau Bauhaus was getting increasingly political. Kandinsky and a fellow artist, also a member of Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four) and his good friend, Paul Klee, were being attacked for their “ivory-tower painting”, and Kandinsky’s classes were boycotted by students from a powerful Communist faction. In July of 1930 his preliminary theory course was strongly criticized for teaching subjective and individual abstract design.

His last years at the Dessau Bauhaus marked a change in Kandinsky’s style. His figures got smaller and diverse; larger, strictly geometric forms appeared with increasing rarity and formats of the paintings themselves grew smaller. His repertoire consisted of regular geometric forms, abstract symbols, elements which seemed organic and shapes similar to the figurines in his Mussorgsky stage sets. Kandinsky began to draw pictorial components by presenting them stacked or arranged in rows. Pictorial structures had only two dimensions and had small components. This fashion was presumably prompted by Kandinsky’s increased focus upon architecture and technology, followed by the arrival of Hannes Meyer to the Dessau Bauhaus. Also, in 1931 Kandinsky received his final opportunity to decorate an interior.

Kandinsky managed to overcome certain difficulties a painter could have; for example, he managed to translate the idea of weight by stripping art back to its basics: a series of conventional motifs assembled in different configurations to represent the entire range of pictorial subjects. He liberated forms and motifs from their surroundings; he used a picture to paint forms, instead of using forms to paint the picture. Therefore these motifs were used as signs, much in the way the letters are used as signs of language, notes as signs of music and numbers and algebraic symbols as signs of mathematics. Zeichenreihen (Rows of Signs) is probably the best example of this theory. It proclaims Kandinsky’s almost mystical role in creating a language of 20th century art. His arrangement of hieroglyphic symbols and ciphers is almost alphabetic. The picture seems like a code to a secret world known only to its painter. Nevertheless, Kandinsky found room for humor in his art, for example in hieroglyphs shaped like a boat and strange looking antennae.