The Red Little Circle

By the summer of 1942 prepared canvas could no longer be found in occupied Paris, and Kandinsky, living in the suburb of Neuilly, ran out. From then on he painted small, working flat on whatever rigid support he could get, wood or cardboard. This picture belongs to that last stretch. It is oil and gouache on a sheet of cardboard, roughly 42 by 58 centimetres, made in 1944, the year Paris was liberated and the year Kandinsky died, in December, at 78. Its floating shapes are the soft, biomorphic kind of his Paris years, closer to small organisms than to the ruled geometry he had painted at the Bauhaus. His monogram and the year, 44, sit in the lower left corner. On the back he numbered it 734, and in 1981 it came to the Centre Pompidou in the bequest of his widow, Nina.