Intimate Celebration

By 1942 Paris had been under German occupation for two years, and Kandinsky was an old man working in a small flat in Neuilly, on the western edge of the city. The Nazis had branded his art degenerate and stripped it from German museums. Materials were scarce, so like many painters then he worked small, often on board, in tempera. These were no longer the hard geometry of his Bauhaus years. They were tiny, soft worlds of biomorphic shapes, forms that suggest embryos, amoebae and creatures from a tide pool, which had come to fascinate him through biology and his contact with the Surrealists. This one he called an intimate celebration, a small gathering of drifting figures on a quiet ground. He went on painting these miniature worlds until his death in Neuilly in 1944.