To the Blue

Kandinsky took French citizenship in 1939, at 72, the same year the war began and Paris emptied of the dealers and collectors who had been buying him. He kept working in the flat at Neuilly on the edge of the city, and he was using house paint. Ripolin, a commercial enamel, mixed into his oils, is what gives the late canvases their flat, even, slightly rubbery colour. The floating shapes here belong to that last decade, soft-edged and rounded, close to the forms he had been copying into his notebooks out of biology and zoology plates, embryos and small sea creatures. The picture stayed with his widow Nina until she left her collection to the French state in 1981, and since 1998 it has hung in Strasbourg, on deposit from the Pompidou Centre in Paris.