Penetrating Green

By 1938 Kandinsky had been living in a flat at Neuilly, just west of Paris, for five years. He had left Germany at the end of 1933, months after the Bauhaus closed under Nazi pressure, where he had taught for more than a decade. The year before he made this painting, 57 of his works were pulled out of German public collections, and some of them were hung in the Munich exhibition of so-called degenerate art. In Paris almost nobody was buying him. He was 72, working in a small room looking over the Seine, and the shapes in his late canvases had gone soft and biological, floating forms closer to things seen under a microscope than to the hard geometry of his Bauhaus years. He kept science encyclopedias with plates of embryos and sea creatures, and individual shapes in these paintings have been traced back to them.