Colourful Ensemble

By 1938 Wassily Kandinsky had settled in Paris, having left Germany after the Nazis shut the Bauhaus, where he taught, and started stripping his work from museum walls as degenerate. In this last chapter of his life his shapes changed. The hard circles and sharp lines of his Bauhaus years gave way to soft, wriggling forms that look borrowed from a biologist's slide: embryos, larvae, tiny sea creatures adrift in fields of colour. Painters call it his biomorphic period. He builds the picture as a crowd of these small beings, a whole miniature population. Along the blue border he scatters little jewel-like signs that read almost like a constellation seen through a microscope, one or two of them like small suns with satellites turning around them.