Wassily Kandinsky: Lithograph "Red Spot II" Tache rouge, Maeght 1960

The picture that served as a basis for this color lithograph came from a series of 8 works that Kandinsky completed in 1921, just before he deliberately went into exile from Russia (the then new Soviet Union) to Berlin with his wife Nina.
 

Because the eye of the beholder is automatically directed toward the white lively area, the four triangles on the corners are perceived later on with a slight delay. Kandinsky also used those triangles in his paintings to mark out the area of focus. This central area, whose Kandinsky’s biographer Will Grohmann called the “stage of the pictorial process”, is an octagonal brittle form, almost hard with a “cool tension” to it. Nevertheless, Grohmann considered all eight pictures of this year as “of the highest perfection”.