Floating Line (Schwebend Linie)

By 1930 Fritz Winter painted only abstract works after studying at the Bauhaus under Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer. He spent the period of the Nazi regime in "inner emigration" in a small lakeside town in southern Bavaria and was banned from painting in 1937. After war service, Winter returned to Munich in 1949, where he co-founded the Group of Abstractionists (Gruppe der Gegenstandslosen, renamed ZEN 49 the following year). Winter’s paintings employ a formal language freed from symbols, and are interested instead in creating an international language of art, an idea taken from Winter’s early Bauhaus teachers. This painting is a prime example of his balanced, geometric pictorial compositions of the 1950s that allude to the omnipotence of nature, utilizing abstract forms to make hidden or unknown structures visible.