Various Actions

Kandinsky was in his mid-seventies in 1941, living in a flat at Neuilly-sur-Seine on the western edge of a Paris under German occupation. Canvas and oil colour were getting hard to come by, his formats kept shrinking, and in September 1942 he used the last canvas he had and worked in gouache on card from then on. This is one of the larger pictures of those years, 89 centimetres by 116, and the paint is oil mixed with enamel, the hard glossy sort sold for household jobs. The forms are the soft amoeba-like shapes of his last decade, floating in pale greens, pinks and blues, a long way from the ruled geometry of his German teaching years. He gave it the plainest possible title, Actions variées, various actions.