Movement I

In 1933 the Nazis closed the Bauhaus, the German school where Kandinsky had taught for over a decade, and at 67 he left for the outskirts of Paris. Something loosened in the work he made there. The hard, compass-drawn circles and grids of his Bauhaus years are still around in Movement I, painted in 1935, but they now share the canvas with soft, wormy, almost biological shapes, the kind of forms you would find under a microscope rather than on a drafting table. He had started keeping books on zoology and embryology in the studio. Against a dark ground the small colored elements drift and cluster as if alive, which is the sense the title reaches for. He would spend the rest of his life in France.