Sweet trifles

1937 was a bruising year for Kandinsky's standing in Germany. That summer the Nazi regime opened its Degenerate Art show in Munich, hanging modern works up for ridicule, and his paintings were among those pulled from German museums. He himself was in Paris by then, having left when the Bauhaus school, where he had taught, was closed in 1933. The light of the city changed his painting. The hard geometry of his Bauhaus years gave way to soft, floating shapes that look almost biological, closer to things seen under a microscope than to circles and grids. He was reading scientific journals on embryology and zoology, and tiny organisms seem to drift across many of these late canvases. This one is tall and narrow, its title promising something light, and the small forms scattered over it keep that promise.