Striped

By 1934 Kandinsky had lost his teaching post twice over. The Nazis had shut the Bauhaus in Berlin the year before, and at 67 he moved to Paris to begin again. His painting changed with the city. The hard circles and triangles of his German years softened into floating shapes that look drawn from a biology book, amoebas and embryos and small drifting creatures. He painted this in November 1934 and stirred sand into the oil, so the surface is dry and grainy rather than smooth. The pale bands that give the work its name run behind those forms like the lanes of a shallow pool.