Untitled

Kandinsky spent the war in an apartment at Neuilly-sur-Seine, just outside Paris, painting small. Canvas and decent paint were hard to come by under the German occupation, so he worked on sheets of cardboard, mixing oil with tempera, and the pictures shrank to about 58 by 42 centimetres. His work had been pulled out of German museums as degenerate in 1937, and the Bauhaus, where he had taught for years, was shut in 1933. Most of the public he had built in Germany was gone. He went on making these cardboard pieces anyway, dozens of them, alongside the gouaches. Paris was liberated in August 1944. Kandinsky died at Neuilly that December, at 77, and the picture stayed with his widow Nina until it entered the French national collection in 1981.