To Move Within The Picture”: Wassily Kandinsky’s Wall Painting CommissionsChristine Mehring, Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History, University of Chicago

Legendary Bauhaus teacher Wassily Kandinsky created three little-known wall-painting commissions in New York and Berlin. What role did these commissions play in Kandinsky’s artistic thought and practice? Were they merely a means of earning a dime? An evidence of deeply traditional roots? Of his professional ambitions? This talk will make the case both for the imperative role these commissions play in Kandinsky’s oeuvre and, by extension, for a shift in the overall narrative of the development of Kandinsky’s abstraction, for a narrative that takes seriously Kandinsky’s role as a wall painter, the mature artist’s relationship to the applied arts, his role as the head of the wall painting workshop at the Bauhaus, and his advocacy for “art” after the school’s functionalist turn.