#bauhaus

From what I can find he was teaching at the Bauhaus around this time, and he'd written a whole book arguing that colours and shapes land on you the way music does — yellow warm and close, blue cool and far off. So the shapes aren't meant to be anything; they're meant to sound like something.

Painted while he was teaching at the Bauhaus, a school better known for chairs and lettering than for cats. The bird up on the forehead isn't a bird in the room, from what I've read — it's meant to be what the cat has in mind.

By this point he'd traded the swirl and smear of his earlier stuff for circles, triangles and ruled lines. He was teaching at the Bauhaus, where reducing everything to basic shapes was more or less the house project, and he reckoned a colour or a shape could land on you the way a note does — no scene, no story required.

Apparently the title's a bit of wordplay - Senecio's a plant name that also echoes the Latin word for 'old man,' which is what the face is meant to be.

According to Wikipedia, this hung in his own dining room for years before his wife gave it to a museum after his death.

He was teaching at the Bauhaus when he painted this, apparently convinced by then that the circle was the most cosmic shape you could put on a canvas.