Violett

Wassily Kandinsky

Lithograph in red, yellow, blue and black

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Violett (Violet) is a colour lithograph created by Wassily Kandinsky in 1923, executed in red, yellow, blue, and black, and comprising an abstract composition of geometric and biomorphic forms characteristic of his Bauhaus period. Born in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky abandoned a career in law to pursue painting, ultimately becoming one of the most influential pioneers of abstract art; by 1922 he had joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in Weimar, where his work shifted toward a harder-edged, methodical geometric abstraction. The print exemplifies the rigorous formal language Kandinsky developed during this phase, in which colour relationships and geometric structure replaced any representational subject matter. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a copy of this work in its Drawings and Prints collection, while another example is documented at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California.