Shapes in Tension

In 1936 Kandinsky was living at Neuilly, on the western edge of Paris, and for this small picture he went back to a craft he had first taken up in Bavaria before the First World War, painting on the back of a pane of glass. The glass itself is modern. The Centre Pompidou, which owns the work, records it as Triplex, the laminated safety glass patented by the French chemist Édouard Bénédictus in 1909 and by then used for car windscreens. The paint is water-based and was laid on in reverse, so the smallest details go down first and the ground last, here a flat black. The panel measures about 29 by 39 centimetres. A study for the same composition in coloured pencil is in the Pompidou too, and both arrived in 1981 with the bequest of his widow, Nina Kandinsky. His monogram sits in the lower left corner.