Small Dream in Red, 1925 by Wassily Kandinsky

This intimate, small painting, with its intriguing title Small Dream in Red, was given as a present by Kandinsky to his wife. Its very character offers a kind of explanation for what may have been in Kandinsky's mind when he wrote to Will Grohmann in 1925: "What are the differences between lyricism and romanticism? Sometimes the circle that I am lately using so frequently cannot be defined in any other way but as romantic. And the future romanticism will surely be profound, beautiful (I am deliberately using the 'old-fashioned' word 'beautiful'), full of meaning - and happiness - it will be like a piece of ice with a flame burning inside it. If people only feel the ice and not the fire, so much the worse for them. . . ."

Kandinsky must have specially favored Small Dream in Red because he published it as the only colorplate in his book Point and Line to Plane (1926), in which he also included a black-and-white illustration representing the painting's linear construction