Graceful Ascent

Kandinsky painted this in March 1934, soon after his life had been upended. The Nazis had shut the Bauhaus, where he taught, the year before, branding its art degenerate, and at sixty-seven he had moved to a quiet suburb of Paris to start again. The work belongs to what is called his biomorphic period. The hard circles and grids of his German years give way here to soft, rounded forms that seem to drift and grow, arranged to pull the eye slowly upward. Living in Paris, Kandinsky grew fascinated by images from biology, and shapes like these owe something to the embryos and tiny sea creatures he had seen in science books.