Kandinsky and Klee
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Kandinsky and Klee
The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar, Germany, in 1919 as a state-sponsored school of art, architecture, and design. The utopian aims of the Bauhaus and its founder and first director Walter Gropius included raising the quality of everyday life through integrated design based on an aesthetic of modernity and universality. The school's curriculum was organized on the principle that the crafts were united with the arts on an equal footing (as they had been in medieval times) and according to the guild system of training under the tutelage of masters.

Sharing Gropius's vision of an international community of artists, Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee were among the school's first teachers. Joining the Bauhaus in 1922, Kandinsky first taught mural painting and, beginning in 1927, what would become his popular free-painting class. During his tenure from 1921 to 1931, Klee taught workshops in diverse subjects such as bookbinding, glass painting, and weaving in addition to painting. When the school was forced to relocate in 1925, Kandinsky and Klee also moved to Dessau, where they shared a double house from 1926 to 1931. Drawn from the Guggenheim's in-depth holdings of paintings and works on paper by both Kandinsky and Klee, this exhibition demonstrates the close relationship between these two artists as manifested in their influence on each other's work during this period.

Vasily Kandinsky, In the Black Square, June 1923. Oil on canvas, 38 3/8 x 36 5/8 inches. Gift, Solomon R. Guggenheim. 37.254. Vasily Kandinsky © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.