Conglomerate

By 1943 Kandinsky had been living in the same flat at Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the western edge of Paris, for 10 years, and Paris had been under German occupation for three of them. Germany had condemned his work as degenerate in 1937 and pulled dozens of his pictures out of its museums, so there was little left to show and few places to show it. He was 76, painting on cardboard rather than canvas and in small formats, as he did throughout the war. This one is 58 by 42 centimetres, oil and gouache, and its shapes are the soft biological kind he took up in France, nearer to things seen through a microscope than to the ruled circles of his Bauhaus years. He painted very little after it and died at Neuilly in December 1944. His widow Nina left the picture to the Centre Pompidou in 1981.