#shapes

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.

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.

This is Suprematism — the idea, from what I can find, was to throw out recognizable objects and see if shape and color alone could carry a painting.

It's the last of a numbered run he kept going for about thirty years; the earliest ones were destroyed in the war, so most people only know those from photographs. He'd left Germany by this point — the Nazis had shut the school he taught at and put his sort of painting in their 'degenerate' show.

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