Points

Wassily Kandinsky

Centre Pompidou

Points (1920) is an abstract painting by Wassily Kandinsky in which clusters of small, colored forms are distributed across the canvas, exploring the visual and emotional power of the most elementary pictorial element. Kandinsky was deeply preoccupied with the theoretical role of the point in art, analyzing it not as a geometric abstraction but as a unit of extension, form, and color whose placement on the picture plane generates distinct inner resonances for the observer. Created during Kandinsky's late Moscow period, just before his departure for Germany and his celebrated tenure at the Bauhaus, the work reflects a pivotal transitional moment in which his thinking moved toward a rigorous, theoretically grounded geometric abstraction. As one of the acknowledged pioneers of pure abstraction in Western art, Kandinsky elevated elementary compositional elements into vehicles for spiritual and emotional expression, a principle he would later codify in his 1926 treatise Point and Line to Plane.