L’accent Rouge 1938

Wassily Kandinsky made L’accent Rouge using oil on canvas sometime in the first half of the 20th century. Kandinsky was one of a number of artists in Europe who believed that art could play a role in social transformation, especially after the first world war. But how could an abstract painting, which looks like nothing so much as pure decoration, fulfill a public role? Thinkers like Kandinsky believed that society had become alienated from spiritual values, and that art could reconnect people to the divine through the universal language of geometrical form. Notice how the flat black ground of the painting allows the floating shapes to speak to each other in a realm that has no fixed location or nationality. It suggests an ideal world where forms can be free from any earthly constraint. Art historians consider a painting like this by examining period writings by the artist and his contemporaries, as well as the records of exhibitions and collections. These sources can tell us much about the meaning of art as something thoroughly embedded in its own time.