Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian born painter, teacher and theorist. He was a pioneer of abstract art; believing that abstract art was capable of expressing a higher spiritual and emotional reality. Born in Moscow in 1866, he studied economics and law at university before moving to Munich to study art. In 1908 he began to develop a style which used rich contrasts of colour and abstract shapes. This style then developed to include precise geometrical forms. After the closure of the Bauhaus by the Nazis in 1933, where he taught, Kandinsky spent his last years in Paris.

This work is a major example of Kandinsky's mystical and abstract approach to art. He argued in 1911 that all reference to the natural world should be removed from art, and that colour was essential in liberating it. The title of this work, ‘Swinging’, conveys a sense of dynamic movement and modernity.