Various Parts

Kandinsky painted this in 1940, his seventh year in Paris, and gave it a French title that simply means various parts. That is a fair description of how it is built. The canvas is divided into rectangular fields of different colours, and the small forms set into them, soft and almost alive, like organisms under a microscope, are arranged so that the whole comes out nearly symmetrical, one half answering the other. The Lenbachhaus sees in this the return of a doubling that runs through all of Kandinsky's work, two halves and two opposing forces held in balance. His friend and biographer Will Grohmann found in the colours of these late years something of the spirit of the East. Two years later Kandinsky took the idea further in Reciprocal Accords, a canvas split into two answering halves, which now hangs in the Centre Pompidou in Paris.