About this work
is an oil painting on canvas completed in 1923. The eye lands first on the large black circle in the canvas's upper left corner, which serves both as a reference point for the smaller circles and as a powerful contrast to the sharp lines and triangles that populate the rest of the field. The painting consists of various geometric shapes, colors, straight and curved lines against a creamy background that blends into pale blue areas at certain points.
The colours used are very varied, ranging from primary colours — red, blue, yellow — to more complex shades of olive green, violet, and ochre.
Despite this apparent profusion of shapes and colours, the work has a rigorous organisation and a certain harmony; the elements are arranged to create strong axes and an overall balance, with empty or monochrome spaces alternating with denser, more colourful areas, giving the whole an impression of coherence and unity. In Kandinsky's own symbolic grammar, the circle represents infinity, the cosmos, and spirituality; the triangle, action, tension, and energy; the square, stability, rationality, and order.
*Composition 8*, one of ten Composition paintings created over a 30-year span from 1909 to 1939, was painted during Kandinsky's tenure as a professor at the Bauhaus, the innovative art and design school then in Weimar, Germany.
It was the artist's first methodical application of his ideas about the relationship between colour and form and his understanding of their spiritual and psychological effects, and marks the beginning of Kandinsky's long and defining connection with the circle.
Audiences of the time were quite shocked by the transition from the apocalyptic emotion of *Composition VII* to the geometric rhythm of *Composition VIII* — the shift signalled a new, cooler rigour without sacrificing inner intensity. Kandinsky himself regarded *Composition 8* as the high point of his postwar achievement.
It reflects the influence of Suprematism and Constructivism assimilated by Kandinsky in Russia and at the Bauhaus, yet remains distinctly his own: the theoretical ideals are not literally implemented but intuitively and poetically interpreted — Kandinsky as a writer was consistent and methodical, but when working on the canvas he became sensual and impulsive.
*Composition 8* was among the first paintings purchased by Solomon R. Guggenheim, who visited the Bauhaus in 1930 and acquired several of Kandinsky's works — the beginning of a vast collection now displayed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York
