Dominant Curve

Kandinsky dated this canvas April 1936. A month earlier German troops had marched into the Rhineland, the strip along the French border kept free of soldiers since the end of the First World War. At the end of April, France, where he had lived for a little over two years, began voting in the elections that would bring the left-wing Popular Front to power. Almost none of that pressure reaches the picture. It is close to two metres wide and painted in light, clear colour. The biggest shape is a broad white band that sweeps round in a curve through the middle. In the top right corner floats a pink form the Guggenheim reads as a schematic embryo, with three black rings lined up above it. The small figures boxed into the green panel at the far left, the museum notes, resemble microscopic sea creatures. On the right, pale planes are stacked like a flight of steps.