Tensions Claires

By 1937 Kandinsky was living just outside Paris, in Neuilly, having moved there after the Nazis shut the Bauhaus in 1933. That same summer the regime hung his work in Munich in a show meant to ridicule it, the Degenerate Art exhibition, and stripped dozens of his paintings from German museums. What he painted in these Paris years looks nothing like the crisp grids and circles of his Bauhaus period. The shapes have turned soft and organic, floating forms closer to something seen under a microscope than drawn with a ruler. This canvas belongs to that late manner. Today it lives in Tehran, whose Museum of Contemporary Art assembled a remarkable collection of Western modern art in the 1970s. Much of it, this Kandinsky included, has spent long years out of sight in the museum's vault.